Race and the Making of the Mormon People

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

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. Mueller also shows how, on a broader level, scripture and history may become mutually constituted. 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. 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. That said, church founders were not racial egalitarians. 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.. They promoted whiteness as an aspirational racial identity that nonwhites could achieve through conversion to Mormonism. 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&

Mueller offers profound insight into both the tradition's American sojourn and the nation's wrenching engagement with race, writ large.--J. Racial issues, shifting though Max Perry Mueller shows them to be, remain a part of Mormon identity, self-understanding, and understanding of the world. Mueller's book makes a significant contribution to our view of Mormonism and race and provides a rich and discerning look at the larger picture of race, religion, and American history.--Philip L. Spencer Fluhman, author of A Peculiar People. Barlow, author of Mormons and the BibleMax Perry Mueller's brilliant analysis substantively enriches a growing body of excelle