Race and the Making of the Mormon People
Max Perry Mueller
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Imprint: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 08/2017
Pages: 352
Subject: Religion, Social Science, History
| University of North Carolina
Print ISBN: 9780000000000
eBook ISBN: 9781469633770
DESCRIPTION
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.