Mormonism and the Heart of Whiteness
by K. Mohrman
Photo by Nancy O'Connor on Unsplash.
In 1993 John D’Emilio’s now famous essay, “Capitalism and Gay Identity,” appeared in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, a collection which brought together many of the pioneering works in gay and lesbian studies, queer theory, and the history of sexuality. Discussion of religion in the reader’s essays is predominantly, although not entirely, limited to a perspective that regards “religion as a stultifying, oppressive institution of a heteronormative, sexist social order,” a perspective that was common and remains stubbornly persistent, both popularly and in academia.[1] Yet, in D’Emilio’s influential essay, there is one (albeit minor and unintended) reference to religion used to support his central claim that “only when individuals began to make their living through wage labor…was it possible for homosexual desire to coalesce into a personal identity” and, thus, for what he calls “gay and lesbian” patterns of living, socializing, and relating to evolve between the 1870s and the 1920s “because capitalism allowed individuals to survive beyond the confines of the family.”[2] In the handful of early studies of these patterns that D’Emilio cites, couched between the foundational work of gay historians Jonathan Ned Katz and Allan Bérubé, one reference stands out: the inclusion of Vern and Bonnie Bullough’s 1977 report on their discovery of an unfinished ethnographic study of “homosexuals” in Salt Lake City, Utah, conducted between the 1920s and 1930s by researcher Mildred J. Berryman, herself a self-identified “homosexual.”[3] Berryman, like the majority (if not all) of the subjects she interviewed, was born into Mormonism.[4]
Typically, this bit of academic trivia elicits one of two reactions: a shrug of dismissal or an eyebrow raised in surprise, which is quickly lowered. Even if Mormonism is thought about in relation to the history of sexuality at all, it is most certainly thought about in terms of nineteenth-century polygamy, not the emergence of LGBT identities and communities. Even then preconceptions about the experiences, motivations, and meanings of Mormon plural marriage have tended to foreclose much, although certainly not all, critical investigation into Mormonism’s place in the history of sexuality. For instance, why haven’t scholars taken up the monogamous/polygamous binary, like they have the homosexual/heterosexual binary? Arguably, the former has been just—and the case can be made that it still is—as animating as the latter in delineating the lines between normative and deviant, white and non-white in the US. But I digress.[5]
I begin my reflections on the place of Mormonism in the history of sexuality with D’Emilio’s oblique reference to Berryman’s study in order to highlight two points. The first is that certain kinds of non-normative sexual practices, arrangements, identities, and knowledges have been regarded, consciously or not, as not only more interesting but more relevant to the field of the history of sexuality. In particular, a focus on homosexual identity and same-sex sex have tended, even if unintentionally, to recenter the homosexual/heterosexual binary so dominant in Western societies and scholarship.[6] This limited focus on specific kinds of non-normative sex and sexuality is also often circumscribed by assumptions about the context in which sex/sexuality exist. In other words, certain contexts, in this case a religious context, determine scholarly interest (or lack thereof) in (non-normative) sex and sexuality; or, in some cases, context is disregarded as having little or no relationship to understandings of sex and sexuality in history. Assumptions about and/or disregard for context represents another equally stubborn binary that is reified in contemporary scholarship in the history of sexuality: the religious/secular binary.
The problems with reifying these two binaries become acutely obvious when religion is centered in research on the history of sexuality: assumptions about the sexual practices, identities, structures, and knowledges associated with particular religious traditions are often uncritically accepted as gospel among researchers, rather than critically interrogated as historically and culturally contingent social formations. Challenging these prevailing assumptions about Mormonism, Taylor Petrey’s Tabernacles of Clay demonstrates what can be uncovered when scholars examine the historical development of a religious tradition’s attention to, views on, and policies about gender and sexuality over time (e.g., no, the LDS Church did not always excommunicate people for being gay). In a similar vein, with implications beyond the specific case study of Mormonism, Peter Coviello’s Make Yourselves Gods illustrates how attention to religion in the early history of sexuality can help us to recognize secularism as an enduring hegemonic force of liberalism. Both Petrey’s and Coviello’s work illustrates the extent to which attention to religion in the history of sexuality, embodied in the specific vicissitudes of Mormonism, is necessary for challenging what Anthony Petro identifies as the parts of the repressive hypothesis (not incidentally, a dogged version of the secularization thesis) that so many scholars still cling to: “we like the story of sexual minorities shirking off outdated forms of religious control.”[7]
The second point D’Emilio’s reference to Berryman’s study highlights is that Mormonism has served as an important source of evidence in the history of sexuality—often unconsciously, but increasingly consciously, and in both surprising and predictable ways—for the last fifty years. The simultaneous implicit presence yet explicit absence of Mormonism in D’Emilio’s study (and to an extent in the larger field) illustrates a curious paradox leading to some interesting questions about the place of religion in research on the history of sexuality. For instance, what has been lost in a less-than-attentive and less-than-critical approach to religion in the history of sexuality? What might be made of the fact that, other than Berryman’s study of homosexuals who were born and resided in the orthodox context of Mormon Utah, much, if not most, of D’Emilio’s, Katz’s, and Bérubé’s evidence comes from the presumptively secular spaces of New York and San Francisco and other large coastal cities? Indeed, is this distinction between the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century spaces of “orthodox” Mormon Utah and “secular” coastal cities even accurate or useful, as Coviello’s theory of secularism as the racialized theodicy of hegemonic liberalism invites us to ask?[8] How might resurrecting the religious context of patterns of “sustaining a group life” among those who began to be defined and/or defined themselves by their non-normative sexual practices and desires help to illuminate the tensions and contradictions inherent to a project of secularism which dubs certain social formations “good religion” and others “bad belief”?[9] How might critical and careful attention to that context, like the attention Petrey provides in his study, not only reveal scholars’ flawed assumptions about religion and its relationship to gender and sexuality but also “how saturated by distorting secularist premises even our most cherished languages of critique yet remain”?[10]
We scholars of the history of sexuality and Mormonism, as Coviello’s and Petrey’s work so compellingly demonstrates, are beginning to ask these and other questions as well as to offer some provocative answers that have implications far beyond the confines of just one religious tradition—although it can be difficult to convince those outside of Mormon studies that these implications do indeed go beyond Mormonism (but that is perhaps a point for another time). One of the through lines in these scholars’ work is the extent to which social formations of sex, gender, and sexuality defined in relation to Mormonism are inherently connected to what Michael Omi and Howard Winant so precisely call the “master category” of race. While this connection should hardly be surprising since so many have demonstrated the history of sexuality to be, fundamentally, also a history of race and white supremacy, Coviello’s decision to explicitly name his “interest in the racial history of sexuality”[11] is a reminder that like secularism, white supremacy continues to structure much scholarship in this area because, in fact, secularism cannot be separated “from whiteness, and its violent aggrandizement.”[12] Thus, his argument that secularism is “an encompassing and, in its effects, disciplinary force,” or more simply a form of biopolitics, is helpful for revisiting the links between sexuality, race, and gender, especially as those links were forged and continue to solidify in the crucible of Euro-American Christian settler colonialism, out of which Mormonism itself also emerged.
While Coviello’s Make Yourselves Gods mostly limits discussion of the biopolitics of secularism to early-nineteenth-century Mormonism, his insights are easily extended to modern Mormonism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Petrey does so by meticulously charting how the Church’s leaders both leveraged and contributed to modern biopolitical discourses of gender and sexuality, simultaneously touting essentialist and social constructionist views in the service of a heteronormative cosmology. He plots the Church hierarchy’s interest in defining and regulating sexual activity, gender roles, and marriage from the years immediately following the end of World War II, when interracial marriage and segregation were top concerns among Church leaders, to the first two decades of the twenty-first century, during which time Church leaders have been preoccupied with cementing heterosexuality as a fundamental component of pre- and post-mortal, if not mortal, life. Although Coviello’s and Petrey’s work deal with two different time periods, covering a broad range of Mormonism in the history of sexuality, there is still much to be learned from the Mormon example about the relationship between sexuality and race in the context of secular liberalism. One of the central claims in my own book, Exceptionally Queer: Mormon Peculiarity and US Nationalism, is that attention to the ways sexuality and gender are thought, regulated, and contested in and around Mormonism in the US is elucidatory for recognizing the ways that religion and sexuality, as intimately related social formations, have both been central to the establishment and maintenance of racial nationalism in the service of US empire. I do this, in part, by charting the deployment of gender and sexual exceptionalist discourse—versions of US exceptionalism that claim racial superiority for specific nations or groups through assertions of consummate knowledge about and/or practice of, gendered and sexual practices, roles, and relations—in relationship to Mormonism in order to illustrate how race and racism have remained central to modern governance in the US.
Because most work in the history of sexuality has focused on the period between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it has made it difficult to see how discourses of gender and sexual exceptionalism in the later twentieth century still functioned as a way to reconstitute race’s centrality to US society and politics, no longer primarily through the explicit language of segregation, but through the new register of colorblindness. Seeing Mormonism’s place in this historical trajectory has been even harder since most work on Mormonism in the history of sexuality focuses on the nineteenth century (Petrey’s work is a welcome respite from this almost exclusive focus). However, much like Coviello shines “a light through early Mormonism” in order to illustrate how it has been shaped by “the hegemonic formation” of secularism, a light can also be shown through twentieth-century Mormonism to do the same, only in this case doing so does not illustrate how early Mormons were regarded as “racialized heretics and deviants” but rather how, reconstituted as a patriotic religion, Mormonism was used to help reconstruct US empire in the colorblind terms of white monogamy.[13] While Petrey rightly identifies how “the concept[s] of homosexuality and heterosexuality came to dominate the structure of Mormon teachings about gender and sexuality in the period since World War II,” he mistakenly concludes that they “eventually eclips[ed] racial and patriarchal teachings.”[14] Yet, as much work in the history of sexuality and queer theory, queer of color critique especially, demonstrates, the emergence of the homosexual/heterosexual binary did not replace but rather reinvented the ways that race and white supremacy came to structure society.[15] This process of reinvention, as well as how sexual and gender norms served as key tools in this process, is clarified by looking carefully at the circumstances of Mormonism’s mainstream reconstruction as a “good religion”: by the 1950s the Church was rebranded as a “thoroughly American institution”; the unambivalent and explicit anti-Blackness espoused by the Church through the late 1970s was largely ignored if not accepted by white Americans; its assimilationist stance toward Native peoples was widely praised by mainstream media and politicians; and the Church’s increasingly tight regulation of gender and sexual norms during this period was widely lauded as an example for the rest of the nation.[16] The sum total of these circumstances allow scholars a special opportunity to assess the ways that appeals to “traditional” or “family values” were never simply gendered or sexual claims to morality but were always already racial claims that communicated an implicit commitment to resisting widespread structural challenges to white supremacy.[17]
Of course, it is easier to comprehend connections between debates over gender roles and sexual propriety in late-twentieth-century discussion of Mormonism by contextualizing them within the longer history of heterosexuality’s emergence as a racialized norm, both nationally and in the Church itself. Although Petrey argues that “modern Mormon views of gender and sexuality were products of the mid-twentieth century,” my own work identifies the thirty years between 1890 and 1920 as the foundational period for the development of modern Mormonism’s commitments to heterosexuality and heteronormativity.[18] It was also during this period that the Church developed a clear commitment to capitalism. At the same time that the Church increased surveillance and management of sexual activity, it also instituted strict campaigns promoting normative gender roles, rules for marital comportment, and expectations for adherence to free-market ideology and activity. Church messaging increasingly emphasized “responsible individualism” as a standard for economic, gendered, and sexual activity that reflected a widely understood and long-standing white supremacist idea that only those who were racially superior (i.e., civilized) were hard working and could exercise sufficient self-control of their bodies, desires, and labor. In short, my own research shows that the Church’s modern views of gender and sexuality developed in step with the wider culture. Yet, Mormonism is frequently identified as out of step with the rest of US society.
Just as many scholars like “the story of sexual minorities shirking off outdated forms of religious control” and stick to it despite the evidence, so too do many of us like the story of Mormonism as being out of step: delayed, backward, deviant, peculiar, queer. Coviello himself embraces what I call the notion of Mormon peculiarity through the framework of queer theory: he identifies “a great tradition of Mormon perversity” that leads him to hail the early Mormons as queer.[19] My own reading of Mormon history vis-à-vis queer theory however leads me to conclude something different. On the whole, Mormons and Mormonism—even in their earliest iterations—have been largely in step with the basic trends in US history, not just those charted by historians of sexuality. I do not mean to jump on the bandwagon of “the liberalizing impulse of Mormon criticism” (having witnessed that impulse and its effects first-hand, not only as a non-Mormon scholar of Mormonism but a non-Mormon queer born in Salt Lake City) but rather to point out that the norms of secular liberalism from which deviance is measured and racialization is produced have not been stagnant over time.[20] What counted (and now counts) as normative, civilized, superior, secular, self-sufficient, white, American was and is a moving target (and was especially in those early years of Mormonism’s development); yet each struggle to define these statuses helps to solidify them into existence and permanence under the mantle of liberal secularism. To me, what is most useful about researching Mormonism in the history of sexuality is that it allows us as scholars to better see the ways that queerness itself can and does function—perhaps more than we would like—as a biopolitical project that forwards “ascendant white American nationalist formations.”[21] This is why I regard any and all claims that Mormonism or Mormons are weird, different, out-of-step, odd, retrograde, unique, or, yes, even queer, with extreme suspicion. Indeed, as my book charts, claims of Mormon peculiarity, regardless of their intended function, have long been used to bolster notions of US exceptionalism largely through the production of sexual normativity and racial hierarchy.
Although the work of Coviello, Petrey, and myself represents a high-water mark of interest in Mormonism and the history of sexuality, we are not the first to tackle the topic. Mormon studies scholars have done so on and off since the 1980s. This work ranges from the early studies of Mormon sexual culture by Lawrence Foster and Louis J. Kern, to the early feminist analyses of nineteenth-century Mormon polygamy by Julie Dunfey and Joan Iverson, to the prolific research of D. Michael Quinn on same-sex sexuality in Mormonism as well as Connell O’Donovan’s and Douglas A. Winkler’s work on LGBT Mormon history, to more recent work on polygamy and Church teachings about and Mormon activism around gender and sexuality by Christine Talbot, Margaret Denike, Carmon B. Hardy and Dan Erickson, and Neil J. Young. As scholars of Mormonism and sexuality add new work to this list, we begin to uncover the myriad ways that Mormonism, alongside other religious traditions and institutions, has resided at the heart of the history of sexuality all along.
However, we also must be careful to identify and avoid the tendency to focus only on certain kinds of non-normative sexual acts, systems, identities, and knowledges to the detriment of others, which may in turn reify preconceptions about Mormonism as well as the homosexual/heterosexual and religious/secular binaries. It makes sense that both nineteenth-century polygamy and, increasingly, the Church’s twentieth-century heterosexist and homophobic views and policies have been the two main foci of research thus far. But what about interracial sex and marriage? What about sex work, pornography, or other sexual cultures outside of marriage? What about views and theories of non-procreative sex and pleasure? How do any of these questions change when we don’t assume a US-centric Mormonism? For instance, how have the Church’s policies on gender and sexuality traveled with missionaries and other Church representatives as the religion has expanded globally? How have those policies come into contact with, challenged, or changed local sexual and gender cultures? Has Mormon missionizing significantly collided with the policing or securitization of national borders as those processes occur through the racially charged registers of gender and sexuality? Given the ways that Mormonism’s relationship to sexuality and gender has consistently produced racial meanings, categories, and knowledges used to bolster US settler colonialism and imperial governance, it is imperative that we continue to ask these and other questions with attention to the transnational context in which Mormonism has always existed. These are but a few of the directions open to future scholars of Mormonism in the history of sexuality.
[1] Melissa M. Wilcox, “Outlaws or In-Laws? Queer Theory, LGBT Studies, and Religious Studies,” Journal of Homosexuality 52, no. 1 (2006): 74. It is important to note that despite its continued prevalence in some quarters, the typical perception and approach to the study of religion as always already oppressive in both the history of sexuality and queer theory is certainly shifting, largely as result of the influence of historians of religion and sexuality and queer theology. Evidence of this shift can be seen in the publication of several studies that examine LGBTQ religious histories and experiences and/or apply queer theory to the study of various religious traditions, groups, and institutions, such as those discussed in this roundtable. See, also: Ashon Crawley, Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017); Gillian Frank, Bethany Moreton, and Heather R. White, eds., Devotions and Desires: Histories of Sexuality and Religion in the Twentieth-Century United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018); Adriaan van Klinken’s, Kenyan, Christian, Queer: Religion, LGBT Activism, and Arts of Resistance in Africa (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019); K. Mohrman, Exceptionally Queer: Mormon Peculiarity and US Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming June 2022); Anthony Petro, After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Melissa E. Sanchez, Queer Faith: Reading Promiscuity and Race in the Secular Love Tradition (New York: New York University Press, 2019); Evren Savci, Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics Under Neoliberal Islam (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021); Roberto Strongman, Queering Black Atlantic Religions: Transcorporeality in Candomblé, Santería, and Vodou (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019); Melissa M. Wilcox, Queer Nuns: Religion, Activism, and Serious Parody (New York: New York University Press, 2018); and Heather R. White, Reforming Sodom: Protestants and the Rise of Gay Rights (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015).
[2] John D’Emilio, “Capitalism and Gay Identity,” in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, eds. Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin (New York: Routledge, 1993), 470–471.
[3] D’Emilio cites the Bullough’s report in footnote four of “Capitalism and Gay Identity,” 476. Both the Bullough’s report and Mormon historian D. Michael Quinn discuss the religious backgrounds of the study participants, including Berryman herself. See Vern Bullough and Bonnie Bullough, “Lesbianism in the 1920s and 1930s: A Newfound Study,” Signs 2, no. 4 (1977): 895–904; and D. Michael Quinn, “The Earliest Community Study of Lesbians and Gay Men in America: Salt Lake City,” in Same-Sex Dynamics Among Nineteenth-Century Americans: A Mormon Example (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996). It is important to note that D’Emilio himself has come to criticize the lack of focus on religion in the history of sexuality (his own work included) and continues to call for scholars to attend to this absence. See Rebecca Davis, Gillian Frank, Bethany Moreton, and Heather Rachelle White, “Believe It: Finding Religion in the History of U.S. Sexuality,” NOTCHES: Remarks on the History of Sexuality, November 24, 2014.
[4] See Quinn’s discussion of Berryman’s and her interviewees’ religious backgrounds in Same-Sex Dynamics, 197–198.
[5] See K. Mohrman, “Polygamy,” in The Routledge History of American Sexuality, eds. Kevin P. Murphy, Jason Ruiz, and David Serlin (New York: Routledge, 2020), 263–275; and Mohrman, “A Peculiar Race with Peculiar Institutions, 1847–1874,” in Exceptionally Queer.
[6] On the centrality of this binary in twentieth-century Western culture, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). The recentering of this binary also has the effect of privileging the period between the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century as the most important in the history of sexuality, sometimes to the exclusion of other important periods. For example, too limited a focus on the period between 1880 and 1940 ignores the development of (homo/hetero)sexuality’s conceptual antecedents, especially as those antecedents were tied to racialized understandings of bodies. On this latter point, see Kyla Schuller, The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018); and Mohrman, “A Peculiar Race with Peculiar Institutions, 1847–1874,” in Exceptionally Queer.
[7]Anthony Petro, “Religion,” in The Routledge History of American Sexuality, 295.
[8] Peter Coviello, Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 46.
[9] D’Emilio, 470. Coviello provides the language of “bad belief” versus “good religion” in Make Yourselves Gods.
[10] Coviello, 47.
[11] Ibid., 4. Emphasis added.
[12] Ibid., 235.
[13] Ibid., 17. See Mohrman, “A Thoroughly American Institution, 1936–1962,” and “Making Mormon Peculiarity Colorblind, 1960–1982,” in Exceptionally Queer.
[14] Taylor Petrey, Tabernacles of Clay: Sexuality and Gender in Modern Modernism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020), 216.
[15] For a representative example of this type of work, see Julio Capó Jr., Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami Before 1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017); Julian B. Carter, The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 1880–1940 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Cathy Cohen “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics,” GLQ 3, no. 4 (1997): 437–465; Roderick Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Siobhan Somerville, Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); and C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).
[16] Hartzell Spence, “The Story of Religions in America: The Mormons,” Look (January 21, 1958): 63.
[17] See Mohrman, “A Thoroughly American Institution, 1936–1962,” and “Making Mormon Peculiarity Colorblind, 1960–1982,” in Exceptionally Queer.
[18] Petrey, 7.
[19] Coviello, 216.
[20] Ibid., 7, 236.
[21] Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 22.
K. Mohrman (she/her) is a clinical teaching assistant professor of Ethnic Studies, Women and Gender Studies, and Religious Studies at the University of Colorado, Denver. Trained as an interdisciplinary scholar of US popular culture and politics with a particular focus on Mormon history and religion, the central concern of her research is with the role of sexuality and gender in processes of racialization, biopolitical governance, and settler colonialism. Her book, Exceptionally Queer: Mormon Peculiarity and US Nationalism (UMP 2022) examines how discourse about Mormonism has functioned as a form of US exceptionalism which has helped to establish and maintain racial hierarchy in the US, largely through reference to sexual and gender normativity. A version of her book’s fourth chapter, “Becoming White: Theologizing Heteronormativity in Mormonism, 1890–1945,” won the 2018–2019 LGBTQ Religious History Award, and her scholarship has appeared in a variety of venues, including Radical History Review, The Routledge History of American Sexuality, Mormon Studies Review, and The Routledge Handbook on Gender and Mormonism, among others.