U H Q
I
V O L .
8 6
I
N O .
4
BOOK REVIEWS & NOTICES
370
Race and the Making of the Mormon People
House of Ephraim, thus most favored by God (21).
By Max Perry Mueller
Such racial concepts as they affected blacks and Native Americans form the core of the volume’s narrative. Mueller seeks to “demonstrate how these nonwhite Mormons resisted, acquiesced, and sometimes embraced the racialized theologies of Mormonism” (11). African American Mormon Jane Manning James receives particular attention. James’s photograph, in fact, adorns the cover. Mueller asserts that James’s troubled LDS odyssey demonstrates the declining status of Mormon blacks from the 1840s, when she first joined the church, to the time of her death in 1908. Such declension is evident in the stark fact that this staunchly devout black Latter-day Saint, who enigmatically proclaimed, “I am white with the exception of the color of my skin,” was repeatedly denied the sacred temple ordinances she so earnestly sought.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. xii + 333 pp. Paper, $32.50
Max Perry Mueller, a professor of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska, brings a new perspective to the much written upon topic of Mormonism and race through the pages of his Race and the Making of the Mormon People. Mueller’s volume focuses on the Book of Mormon’s impact on emerging Latter-day Saint racial attitudes, asserting that Mormonism’s foundational scripture shaped how white Mormons perceived themselves as a distinct ethnic group while defining the status of the non-whites in their midst. The Book of Mormon “presented a theology of . . . ‘white universalism’” whereby “humanity . . . would be restored to the original white human family” (34). During the 1830s, Mormon preaching to Indians living along the Missouri frontier represented an early effort to fulfill the Book of Mormon prophecy that the Lamanites would convert to Mormonism and be literally transformed into “a white and delightsome people.” But, as Mueller argues, the Book of Mormon’s “‘white universalism’ proved too ambitious to be tolerated in antebellum America,” with the fledgling Latter-day Saint movement “quickly adapting” to the prevailing “racial hierarchies of the American Republic,” becoming not just “mainstream [but] extreme in their [racial] views” (20). This represented “a downward trend away from racially inclusive originalism to racial particularism.” Complicating this process was the contradictory fact of “the Mormon people’s identity [as] a missionary people divinely called to teach the gospel to everyone everywhere” while concurrently identifying themselves as a “racially particularistic people”—indeed the literal descendants of the
Representative of Native Americans who associated with the Mormons were two noteworthy individuals. One was the Ute Indian leader, Walkara, whose relationship with his LDS neighbors alternated between war and peace. The second, “Sally the Lamanite,” was the adopted “daughter” of Brigham Young. Such encounters notwithstanding, Latter-day Saints were less than successful in converting American Indians into Lamanites with the ultimate goal of making them “white and delightsome.” In sum, the volume provides a fresh perspective on the Mormon construction of race through its focus on the role of the Book of Mormon in facilitating this process. Mueller’s thorough, carefully documented narrative of Mormon interactions with Native Americans, or so-called Lamanites, is insightful. Mueller’s assertion that Jane Manning James was a pivotal figure in the declining status of Mormon blacks is enlightening. James’s mere presence,
