Race and the Making of the Mormon People

Max Perry Mueller

ISBN 10: 1469636166 / ISBN 13: 9781469636160

Published by The University of North Carolina Press, 2017

About this Item

The nineteenth-century history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Max Perry Mueller argues, illuminates the role that religion played in forming the notion of three original American races - red, black, and white - for Mormons and others .

Seller Inventory # 447867772

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Race and the Making of the Mormon People
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Publication Date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1469636166
• ISBN 13: 9781469636160
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

The nineteenth-century history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Max Perry Mueller argues, illuminates the role that religion played in forming the notion of three “original” American races—red, black, and white—for Mormons and others in the early American Republic. Recovering the voices of a handful of black and Native American Mormons who resolutely wrote themselves into the Mormon archive, Mueller threads together historical experience and Mormon scriptural interpretations. He finds that the Book of Mormon is key to understanding how early followers reflected but also departed from antebellum conceptions of race as biblically and biologically predetermined. Mormon theology and policy both challenged and reaffirmed the essentialist nature of the racialized American experience.

The Book of Mormon presented its believers with a radical worldview, proclaiming that all schisms within the human family were anathematic to God’s design. That said, church founders were not racial egalitarians. They promoted whiteness as an aspirational racial identity that nonwhites could achieve through conversion to Mormonism. Mueller also shows how, on a broader level, scripture and history may become mutually constituted. For the Mormons, that process shaped a religious movement in perpetual tension between its racialist and universalist impulses during an era before the concept of race was secularized.

About the Author

Max Perry Mueller is assistant professor of religious studies at the University of Nebraska.