Joanna Brooks, Mormonism and White Supremacy: American Religion and the Problem of Racial Innocence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020)

I

Like her earlier volume edited with Gina Colvin, Decolonizing Mormonism (University of Utah, 2018), Joanna Brooks’s new Mormonism and White Supremacy is an exhortation as much as it is an academic work. Both both books ask us to consider where the lines between academic analysis and moral analysis exactly lie. Brooks discards the traditional pretense of academic objectivity, the stentorian presumption of omniscience that echoes through the pages of most university-published tomes.

To that end this book will probably be most comprehensible to Latter-day Saint audiences, and Brooks probably intends that. Her book moves quickly through the history of the tradition and assumes some familiarity on the reader’s part with phrases like “First Presidency” and “John Taylor.” Brooks inserts herself into the narrative, a product as well as an analyst of the community she writes about. Indeed, in a real sense this book is a plea to that community. Brooks’s first lines testify to that: “This book seeks to instigate soul-searching,” she declares, “academic, institutional, and personal.” (1)

She writes as an anguished Mormon. She wants her fellow Saints to mourn with those that mourn. She believes that though her tradition has enabled such pain, its Christian roots also equip it to be particularly convicted by the reality of pain and particularly prepared to pursue its alleviation. Brooks not only describes what Christian theology is—she also declares what Christian theology should be quite straightforwardly. A “robust Christian conceptualization of sin would hold that it is a deadly but structuring condition of mortality, just as racism is a deadly but structuring condition of life in the United States.” (5)

Is this unusual for a book about history published by Oxford University Press? In some ways. As American academia institutionalized and professionalized, gradually academics, like journalists, came to see themselves as neutral arbiters, and though every introductory graduate course in the humanities solemnly counsels graduate students that objectivity is impossible, most books (at least in the discipline of history) tend to avoid personalizing the narrative. There is, though, a range of newer scholarship pressing back against this, forcing us to consider ourselves as authors and to perceive the public and political implications of our work. This is probably a good thing.

II

Though Brooks’s prose has a light touch a fair amount of theory drifts through the book. This means while it seems to be written for a Mormon audience it will also be most easily digested by those with at least some familiarity with academic theory about race. That choice may be dangerous, given Brooks’s intentions. But this is still a compelling story about the enactment of a grim tautology. Early Mormons were mostly white people who took for granted their whiteness—an identity then as now with uncertain borders that white Mormons among many others have contributed to defining and clarifying as, for the most part, themselves. Because they were white they believed the church they founded also to be white—if only implicitly.

It is important to recognize that while many Americans imagine “racism” in terms of making conscious choices that reflect disdain for people of other backgrounds, a more useful conceptualization of the term acknowledges that is as much or more about assumption, conditioning, structure and possibility as it is about individual animus or aggressive hate. Therefore, white Mormons simply by default assumed the church’s structures and cosmology to coincide with the racial distinctions they understood to exist on earth. Hence as they created their church they also created, to some extent, what whiteness meant.

And hence, white Mormons like many other white Christians imputed those distinctions onto the hierarchies of eternity, lending the racial structures they believed to exist the weight of divine sanction. As white Mormons teased out their theologies—of sealing, of divinization, of temple worship and priesthood—they nearly always stumbled over people they understood to be not white. These people were to them theoretical problems, needing theological explanation and a place to be slotted into their unfolding maps of heaven. That process defined what it meant to be white in the context of this religion, but it also gave white supremacy on earth divine sanction and justification. By the twentieth century when questioned about its existence within their church, Mormons could simply point to God.

Brooks focuses here primarily upon “whiteness” and “blackness” as categories of identity in white Mormons’ imagination. There are, of course, any number of other racial identities that might play a part in this story. There are also many, many elements co-constitutive with racial identity that Brooks does not touch upon; in particular I think of the co-formation of race and class, as the economic aspects of identity are often overlooked in academic work on Mormonism and race, or religion and race more generally. But Brooks stays focused on the simple fact of white supremacy itself, and how Mormons came to reify it, and that relentlessness gives the book the moral power of a jeremiad.

III

Structurally and conceptually, this book reminds me of Colleen McDannell’s recent Sister Saints (Oxford, 2018). Like that book, this one retells a familiar history from a new angle. We are acquainted with most of Brooks’ characters: they are high church leaders, intellectuals, and activists. She has not really uncovered any stories that historians did not already know. But she has told them in a new way, viewed them through the lens of theory, and showed us new shadows that these people cast, or new light that they threw.

So, like McDannell, her book points to the possibility of stories told from other perspectives—and indeed, Brooks exhorts her Latter-day Saint readers to perceive that possibility, to be aware of other stories, and to do what they can to elevate them. Her introduction and conclusion call upon her Latter-day Saint readers to plumb their tradition in order to confront the challenge. Indeed, one comes away from Brooks’s book with the impression that though this tradition has caused such pain, the Christian resources it has within it might enable believers to be particularly attuned to suffering, particularly equipped for repentance, and particularly capable of imagining what a just and Zion society might look like.

Though Brooks’s subjects often act in ways most Americans today would find distressing, Brooks warns us not to be distracted. She does not “wish to impugn the character of individuals. Rather my goal is to assess how systems of inequality take shape through everyday conduct and choices, policies, laws, and theologies, so that we have a better sense of how to dismantle them.” (17)

Stories point us past themselves toward systems. Individuals make decisions circumscribed by institutions. The real task ahead is not simply to rage at the stories that we have been told or to condemn those who enact injustice. The real task ahead is to write new stories and raise new generations, and hence to build new systems. That task is what this book helps us—Mormons and academics alike—to imagine.