Benjamin E. Park

When Joanna Brooks wrote the manuscript for Mormonism and White Supremacy: American Religion and the Problem of Racial Innocence (Oxford University Press), she likely didn’t expect it to be so timely. (Few historical works ever are.) But the official publication date for the book, June 1, coincided with protests across the nation that called for an end to racial oppression. The loud chants for #BlackLivesMatter have forced institutions, corporations, and churches to reassess their connection to the systematic racism upon which America was built. Mormonism and White Supremacy, then, was perfectly timed to add to a growing chorus at a moment of discursive crescendo.

Yet in other ways, Brooks’s work was a long-time coming, as it reflects decades of work within the LDS intellectual community, and it builds on the efforts of previous historians and activists who have paved the way to reassess Mormonism’s troubled history with white supremacy. Yet what the book lacks in novelty it certainly makes up for in punch: it is one of the most trenchant and persuasive appeals to confront the history of LDS anti-black racism, past and present, and is a clarion call for academic intervention in contemporary issues. Scholarship, she argues, must accept its role of “unsettling and interjecting urgency into conversations around religion and race in America.” In this instance, her aim is to “evolve our discussion of the role of American Christianity has played in securing and sustaining racial privilege more broadly.”

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Few texts have proven to be as controversial as the Book of Mormon. Designated the “keystone” of the LDS faith by none other than Joseph Smith, it has proven to be the “third rail” for both apologists and critics alike. As a result, many scholars who look at the Mormon tradition have steered clear of the founding text. Recently, however, there has been a growing number of academics, especially literature scholars, who have found innovative ways to approach the Book of Mormon that simultaneously provide new cultural insights while also avoiding tricky questions of historicity. Much of that interpretive move, however, has involved sidestepping the questions of the book’s origins and instead focusing on the text itself.

But those conversations can only go so far.

William Davis’s new book, Visions in a Seer Stone: Joseph Smith and the Making of the Book of Mormon (UNC Press), makes the argument that those two issues, the book’s origins and its text, cannot be easily separated. Indeed, he posits that internal cues found within the Book of Mormon itself hint to a very different origins story than has typically been understood.

At the heart of Davis’s monograph is an investigation into the oral culture of early America. Joseph Smith was raised in a world of performance: lectures were a primary form of education, and sermons were a predominant form of worship. Davis performs a deep dive into the contemporary literature to show the different techniques that were being taught and used during the period, and even demonstrates how Smith’s later texts (like his 1832 history) and sermons (like the King Follett discourse) exemplified their methods, and serve as evidence of his knowing the general trends. Even if Smith did not receive extensive schooling, then, scholars have overlooked the extent to which the Mormon prophet was conversant with his surrounding performative culture.

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One of the harbingers of the Mormon studies field’s development has been the increasing number of scholars who have turned their attention to the faith in order to explain broader academic issues. The most recent contribution to this growing trend is Peter Coviello, literature scholar and author of a handful of well-received books, whose Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism was published in the University of Chicago Press’s prestigious “Class 200” series. This series, edited by Kathryn Lofton and John Modern, prides itself on being interdisciplinary, innovative, and provocative; Make Yourselves Gods is no different.

Though early Mormons make up the subject of Coviello’s study, the true object of his focus is “secularism,” a potent word pregnant with many interpretations. Read More