Evaluating Fifty Years of Scholarship on the Racial Restriction
2024; Volume: 11; Linguagem: Inglês
10.5406/21568030.11.06
ISSN2156-8030
Autores Tópico(s)Critical Race Theory in Education
Resumowhen lester bush published his 1973 article “Mormonism's Negro Doctrine: An Historical Overview,” he laid out a new historiography on the Latter-day Saint racial restriction by identifying the problems with scholars assuming that Joseph Smith, rather than his successor Brigham Young, established his church's racial policies and doctrines.1Since Bush's monumental 1973 work, scholars have published over two hundred peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and monographs on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ racial restriction. The article's fiftieth anniversary is an ideal time to reflect on how historians and scholars from other disciplines have written about the place of Black people in the LDS Church since “Mormonism's Negro Doctrine” first appeared. In doing so, I examine Bush's contributions to the historiography and consider how it has shaped studies of the racial restriction in books produced for non-Mormon audiences, in scholarship on global and local Mormonism, in gendered histories of the racial restriction, and in the lives of everyday Black Latter-day Saints.Lester Bush's historiographical importance begins with overturning what was called the “Missouri Thesis.” Pioneered by Stephen Taggart, the Missouri thesis argued that Joseph Smith developed Mormonism's racial restriction in response to Missouri's slavery politics.2 Through careful research, Bush showed that while the church grappled with slavery politics in Missouri, Joseph Smith never endorsed a racial restriction and, in fact, authorized several Black men's ordination to the Latter-day Saint priesthood.The importance of establishing that Smith did not begin the racial restriction cannot be understated. Because the racial restriction had not originated with Smith, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints framed its overturning prohibitions against Black ordination and full temple participation by explaining the change as a restoration of Joseph Smith's original teachings. That is, disassociating the ban from the church's founding prophet paved the way for its renegotiation. Spencer W. Kimball, the church's twelfth president, read Bush's work on anti-Black teachings in Mormonism and, according to his son and biographer Edward L. Kimball, Bush's argument contributed to overturning the church's racial restriction.3 In this way, Bush's Dialogue article not only upended contemporary historiography; it contributed to changes in a global faith's practices.4Scholars expanded Bush's arguments by closely following his source base and chronological narrative in successive decades. These contributions largely replicated and reinforced Bush's work, however. Scholars following Bush's sources and arguments and reproducing them for different scholarly venues functioned like hypothesis-testing for scientific experiments, verifying Bush's conclusions repeatedly until they became accepted as fact. The few attempts to advance an argument that the racial restriction did not originate with Brigham Young failed to offer a rigorous engagement with available primary sources or current historiography.5 Bush's article remains the go-to explainer for how the Latter-day Saint racial restriction arose.6Rather than pursuing new questions, such as what Mormonism's racial practices can tell scholars about their broad historical and cultural contexts, many publications in the fifty years after Bush's publication focused on the restriction's origin and demise.7 Whatever the reason for the lack of new questions in the decades following the publication of Bush's article, the vast majority of scholarship has focused on the historical contexts that facilitated, justified, and entrenched the Latter-day Saint racial restriction in church beliefs and practices, and is often better calibrated to explaining the restriction's origin to practicing Latter-day Saints than to engaging with scholarly conversations. Consequently, for decades after Bush's article, many scholars failed to articulate the racial restriction's importance to their colleagues in religious studies, American religious history, or other fields. This trend highlights choices to address Latter-day Saints rather than the broader academy.At the beginning of the twenty-first century, scholars began to explore what the racial restriction revealed about Mormonism, US history, and religion as a category rather than how the restriction originated and dissolved. For instance, Max Perry Mueller's Race and the Making of the Mormon People is the first interdisciplinary monograph to situate the Latter-day Saint racial restriction within religious studies literature. His careful attention to the Book of Mormon is especially noteworthy. While Latter-day Saints did not use their founding scripture to justify their anti-Black practices, Mueller excavates ideas about race from the text, showing how ideas surrounding a “white universalism” illuminates how Mormons considered non-White peoples to be an aberration from the White norm. He further shows how Latter-day Saints took Abrahamic faiths’ ideas about racial curses and gave them a distinctly Mormon theological twist: all humans had been created imago Dei (in the image of God) and, eventually, all non-White peoples would return to their “original,” White state.8 Mueller also argues that Latter-day Saints of color like Jane Manning James placed themselves within Mormon “archives” (both through the collection of texts in professional archives and within the “archive” of Latter-day Saint historical memory).9 While Mueller's exploration of the meanings of “archive” sometimes blurs without explanation, such as when he conflates the process of creating and preserving texts (in an archival repository) and creating notions of what Mormonism constitutes (the “archive” of who is constituted Mormon and what is considered Mormonism), Race and the Making of the Mormon People introduces religious studies audiences to the racial restriction in broader contexts.The most significant book on the Latter-day Saint racial restriction yet written is W. Paul Reeve's 2015 Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness. Reeve employs Whiteness studies to analyze how and why Americans racialized Latter-day Saints as non-White because of their religious identity, despite the reality that most individual nineteenth-century Mormons would legally be considered White by heritage and appearance. In short, many Americans believed that conversion to Mormonism racially degraded otherwise White people, allowing outsiders to lump them into categories that White Americans considered inferior, such as Indigenous Americans, African Americans, Muslims, and (undesirable) European immigrants.10Reeve's work is revolutionary for several reasons. First, Reeve looks at the concept of the Mormon image to unpack racialization, which other historians had not done at length previously.11 He uses political cartoons and other cultural texts to show how White Americans applied non-White racial scripts to Mormons across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.12 Second, Reeve contributes fresh understandings of how the racial restriction became official church policy. While anti-Black attitudes and practices were present in Mormonism from its founding (even if a church president did not articulate the logic of the practice until 1852), Reeve shows how church president Joseph F. Smith reinterpreted previous historical evidence on Black ordination and oversaw the creation of a formal anti-Black policy regarding ordination and temple participation in the early twentieth century. Other scholars, including Bush, had examined the events in this period, but Reeve employs memory studies to articulate how anti-Black policies became formally adopted through institutional forgetting of its first African American congregants.13 Third, in addition to building from Bush's base, Reeve introduces many new sources to augment historians’ understanding of the racial restriction. He surveys political cartoons, songs, and other cultural historical sources and proves that documentation tracing the Latter-day Saint racial restriction to 1847 was, in fact, not discussed when the ban was formally codified.14While Religion of a Different Color could do more to engage with colonialism's shaping of race and religion or speak to how Euro-American Mormons “passed” as White people because of their phenotypic privilege, Reeve's study is the first to use Latter-day Saint views of race as a means to tell a broader story about religion and race, rather than to explain the origins of the racial restriction to a church audience. As a result, any scholar writing on Mormonism's racial restrictions must engage with Reeve's arguments.Studying the racial restriction's local Latter-day Saint contexts is a welcome addition to the historiography. For instance, scholars have examined activism for and against the restriction in Utah's universities, public and private, to understand how lay Latter-day Saints, non-Mormons, and Latter-day Saint leaders understood the racial restriction's import.15 In many ways, though, these works center White voices rather than Black experiences, reproducing Bush's understanding of how Latter-day Saint leaders created and policed racial boundaries rather than describing what life was like for Latter-day Saints of Black African descent.Scholars have also moved beyond studying Latter-day Saints to tracking how the restriction contributed to teachings and practices in other Mormon sects. Their scholarship affirms how central conceptions of race were to Mormon religious identity and how teachings on race were central to Mormon religious identity beyond Latter-day Saint contexts.16 These scholars demonstrate the value of moving beyond establishing the restriction's timeline to understanding how White church leaders’ decisions shaped Mormon religious life across the color line. Their argumentation makes clear the racial restriction's stakes for Black Latter-day Saints subjected to abuse and discrimination, as well as how White Mormons employed race to differentiate themselves from others.While Lester Bush's 1973 article does not move beyond the boundaries of the United States, many scholars have documented how the racial restriction functioned across the globe. There are a handful of studies of how Mormon anti-Blackness worked in the nineteenth century outside America. One notable example is Christopher Jones's “‘A Verry Poor Place for Our Doctrine’: Religion and Race in the 1853 Mormon Mission to Jamaica,” which traces how Latter-day Saint missionaries reacted to Black interest in Mormonism during the first mission to the Caribbean.17 The first article to examine how the racial restriction developed outside of the United States in the mid-nineteenth century, Jones's essay weaves historiographies of race, empire, and mission studies to show how Latter-day Saint missionaries in the Caribbean contributed to the racial restriction's enforcement.Promisingly, some scholars have begun examining how the racial restriction shaped Black Latter-day Saints’ experiences in Africa. Understanding how and why Black Africans converted to Mormonism sheds light on why Latter-day Saint theology and practice appealed to non-Whites outside the United States and how their conversion contributed to the LDS Church's lifting of the practice in 1978. Though leaders’ thoughts are fundamental to understanding how and why the restriction arose and was managed, focusing on these figures’ thoughts and actions downplays Black voices, activism, and religious meaning. This important scholarly development places Black lives and experiences at the center of scholarship. Crucially, these works also underscore the impossibility of applying anti-Black racial standards across the globe.18When considering how the Latter-day Saint racial restriction has been studied outside the United States, it is essential to recognize that no peer-reviewed monographs center Black Latter-day Saints who lived outside the United States. A monograph placing the racial restriction within global anti-Black contexts will instantly become a historiographical tent pole for Mormon studies.Only within the past decade have scholars begun to devote sustained attention to the Latter-day Saint racial restriction's gendered component: Black women could not participate in all Latter-day Saint temple rituals. Indeed, of more than two hundred peer-reviewed articles on the Latter-day Saint racial restriction, fewer than 1 percent mention the word “temple” in their titles. While roughly 40 percent of these publications mention the racial restriction's relationship to temple rituals and practice, fewer than 10 percent spend more than one paragraph explaining how race and temple collided in Latter-day Saint teaching and practice.19Temple worship is generally understudied within Mormonism, given its sacred/secret nature, but this aspect of Latter-day Saint practice is now a focus in studying Latter-day Saint racial restrictions. For instance, when examining Brigham Young's 1852 address that publicly established the restriction's logic, scholars have recently begun to center the sermon's connections to Latter-day Saint sealing practices.20 Recent work has also explored how Black Latter-day Saints’ experiences lay bare the uneven enforcement of the racial restriction while showing that many White Latter-day Saints were comfortable with Black participation in their religion—but only under certain conditions where they enjoyed fewer privileges than White Saints.21The best examination of how gender, race, and religious practice shaped Black Latter-day Saint life under the racial restriction is Quincy D. Newell's Your Sister in the Gospel: The Life of Jane Manning James, a Nineteenth-Century Black Mormon.22 Two aspects of Newell's book deserve special attention. First, Newell's research employs methods from Native American and African American studies that allow her to reconstruct what it might have been like for a Black Latter-day Saint woman to participate in the day-to-day life of Mormonism during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. No other study captures a Black Latter-day Saint's life as rigorously or with such attention to detail. Newell's ability to build out James's worlds from scant archival records proves how the historiography of the racial restriction benefits from employing new methodologies and fresh examinations of the archival record.Second, Newell's analysis of James's quest to receive temple rituals is the most complete study that we have of a Black person pursuing temple liturgy under the racial restriction. In carefully documenting this quest, Newell pieces together how Latter-day Saint leaders grappled with the racial restriction when it did not involve priesthood ordination for men and, according to James, the Black individual in question had received an invitation to participate in temple rituals.23Crucially, centering the temple requires scholars to focus on women's experiences under the racial restriction and to consider how marriage and family were central to the LDS Church's religio-racial teachings.24 While Latter-day Saint leaders established and policed the contours of the racial restriction, Black women's lives underscore how Latter-day Saint practices produced unequal experiences beyond questions of male ordination. In order to understand Mormonism's ideas about families, which Latter-day Saints believe are the fundamental unit of religion and society, scholars must pay close attention to the entanglement of race, religion, gender, and sexuality.25Newell's biography is the first, but will not be the last, to examine the lived religion of Black Latter-day Saints. Besides Jessie Embry's Black Saints in a White Church: Contemporary African American Mormons, few historians have worked to uncover and contextualize Black Latter-day Saint lives.26 One digital project that provides biographical data related to Black Latter-day Saints holds particular promise: The Century of Black Mormons Project (CBM).27 Hosted at the University of Utah's Marriott Library, the project provides biographical data on Black Mormons who were baptized Latter-day Saints between 1830 and 1930. CBM is ongoing and employs many independent historians, graduate students, and early career scholars to research and write these biographies. In doing so, the project is training the next generations of scholars to examine Black life and experience in Mormonism's first century.Additionally, Black Latter-day Saints have published memoirs, autobiographies, and essays in national publications on their lives and experiences in Mormonism. With the proliferation of social media, digital media, podcasting, and other forms of record capture, future historians will have many more voices and records to rely upon than scholars currently enjoy.Lester Bush's field-shaping work on the racial restriction is still among the best pieces of scholarship on the topic. This is both a testament to his archival work and his article's social impact. It also points to several ways the historiography can move forward. Bush established how the restriction came to be and, purposefully or not, justified its overturning. A new challenge for academics will be to build upon the recent scholarship examined in this essay to show how and why the restriction fits into broader historical trends and why it matters outside of Mormonism.In many ways, Mormon studies is at the same crossroads that Catholic studies was in the mid-1980s. Before that time, Catholic scholars primarily focused on the faith's leaders while also constructing social histories of Catholics in local contexts. Scholars then significantly altered the direction of the field by applying lived religion frameworks to American Catholicism. Suddenly, the oral histories, parish newsletters, worker meeting minutes, and other sources collected by the Catholic Church revealed much more about what Catholicism meant to individuals and why it held such power in individuals’ and communities’ lives. Leaders became much less central to scholarship as researchers pivoted to inquiries exploring how Catholicism functioned on the ground.28 Historians of Mormonism also enjoy a wealth of sources. While social histories are valuable, Mormon studies must implement new methods to construct arguments about the past to advance.Scholars must devote more attention to the non-US dimensions of the racial restriction. While the restriction enormously affected US Mormonism, the Latter-day Saints’ globalization demands greater research into how the restriction moved across nations, continents, wards, stakes, and missions. Those who do this work must make their scholarship broadly accessible to those who study history and religion outside of the United States, and they must show how the intersecting logics of empire, colonialism, and race supported anti-Blackness in different contexts. Experts’ focus must also expand to how the racial restriction affected women, children, and families. By necessity, this will mean connecting the racial restriction to gender, sexuality, and the lives of average Latter-day Saints.By distancing Mormon history from the decisions and decision-making of leaders, Mormon studies scholars have the opportunity to transform their field, moving beyond denominational histories to contributing to broader fields and expanding what scholars know about the racial restriction's implications, meanings, and intersections with broader contexts.29
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