Mormons, Race and

The racial conceptions and policies of Mormonism can best be understood in four overlapping historical contexts: (1) European rationales for colonial expansion, including such concepts as Anglo-Saxon triumphalism and British Israelism; (2) the related American doctrine of Manifest Destiny; (3) the sectional conflicts in the early United States over the status of African American slaves and of Native Americans, along with the religious rationales used to justify the national policies toward those peoples; and (4) the growing preoccupation in popular religion with millennialism and the coming End Times. All four of these contexts generated emotional issues in the American consciousness as the new Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (also “LDS” or “Mormon” Church) came into existence beginning in 1830 along the western frontier. Out of that political, cultural, and religious mix, plus their own religious ingenuity, the Mormons acquired specific doctrines about themselves as a people and about three other ethnic peoples in particular: Jews, Native Americans, and African Americans, or Blacks.

Starting in the mid-1830s, Mormons came increasingly to understand themselves as literal descendants of the Israelite tribe of Ephraim, called out of the world by the Holy Spirit in the End Times, as a kind of vanguard to prepare the world for the gathering of the rest of Israel. The Jews were to be gathered to Palestine and the rest of Israel to North America under the sponsorship of modern Ephraim (i.e., the Mormons). From this perspective, Jews came to be understood by Mormons as literal cousins. Mormon apostles made several trips to Jerusalem during the 19th century to dedicate that holy land for the return of the Jews and consistently supported international efforts to establish a new state of Israel in the ancient Jewish homeland. The modern Mormon Church then cultivated a special relationship with the modern state of Israel. Though the Israeli government has been vigilant in prohibiting Mormon proselytizing there, it has permitted the church to build a large Mormon Center for Near Eastern Studies on Mt. Scopus, in Jerusalem, under the auspices of Brigham Young University, where students come for a semester's study and various church-sponsored religious and cultural events are held.

Given such a Mormon posture toward Israel and the Jews, it is not surprising that anti-Semitism has always been absent in official Mormon discourse, public or private, and is rare among Mormon individuals. Philo-Semitism is far more apparent. Jews living among Mormons in the western states have often testified to warm relationships between the two peoples. The first two Jewish governors of any U.S. state were elected in Mormon country: Moses Alexander in Idaho (1914) and Simon Bamberger in Utah (1916), and systematic surveys have consistently shown comparatively low rates of anti-Semitism among Mormons. While the Mormons officially hold that Jews will eventually be brought to accept Christ as Messiah, Mormon proselytizing among Jews has historically been rare, somewhat halfhearted, and decidedly unproductive.

Where the Native Americans are concerned, Mormon conceptions have varied according to the responsiveness of the various American Aboriginal peoples to proselytizing. The first generation of Mormons, led by the founding prophet Joseph Smith, held a rather idealized view of the “Lamanites,” as the Native Americans were called in Smith's Book of Mormon. They are portrayed there as a temporarily fallen and apostate Israelite race with a divine potential for redemption and destiny as a superior people, if only they will accept the gospel. However, once the [Page 913]Mormons arrived in Utah (1847), the Natives among whom they lived (and skirmished) proved largely impervious to any but the most temporary conversion, although several serious missionary forays produced baptisms in the hundreds. As the century closed, the nomadic peoples of the Americas came to seem less like the redeemable Lamanites of the Book of Mormon and more like “plain old Indians.”

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