Looking for Race in Sites Defined by its Absence
by Heather White
Photo by Bruno Delfino on Unsplash.
Peter Coviello’s Make Yourself Gods and Taylor Petrey’s Tabernacles of Clay both tell the backstory to a national debate over marriage. Separated in time by nearly a century and a half, both of these marriage debates take up civilizational urgency. In the mid-to-late nineteenth century, non-monogamous unions threatened marriage and the nation itself. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the analogous threat is same-sex marriage. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) played a starring role in both debates but with a remarkable role-reversal: once a threat to marriage, the LDS church became one of its staunchest defenders.
This transformation from reviled polygamists to conservative culture warriors is a history known widely enough to serve as a flashpoint in the more recent of these debates. In 2008, fundraising by LDS church leaders decisively shaped the outcome of the Proposition 8 campaign in California, which launched a defense of “traditional” marriage that ultimately revoked the state’s legal recognition of same-sex marriage. While various conservative religious groups supported this campaign, the LDS involvement drew particular ire in part because of the church’s well-known historical practice of plural marriage. “The Mormon Church is the last organization that gets to lecture anyone about ‘traditional’ marriage,” argued one irate commentator. “This is a religious organization that organized marriages between one man and many women in the not-so-distant past.”[1] To these critics, the LDS church’s own history of non-traditional marriage made the political stance on the part of church leaders outrageously hypocritical.
In very different ways, these two books show that race was central to the LDS church’s transformation from threat to defender of traditional marriage. This was not merely a sexual and theological shift but a tripartite transformation, as the LDS church and its members transcended stigmatization as “degenerate heathens” to become at once sexually normal, authentically religious, and respectably white. Each of these books illuminates a different moment in this sexual, religious, and racial transformation. Read together, they suggest that having and embodying the right kind of sex served as a discipline of racial transcendence that enabled the Mormons as a religious group to achieve unmarked whiteness.
Neither of these books makes the claim above directly. My essay begins by highlighting each book’s provocations about the racialization and racial erasures of LDS teachings about sexuality. I then focus on the unresolved puzzle I find in both, namely: how to analyze the conjoined disciplining of sexual and racial regulation within LDS theology and practice after the post-civil rights era shift to seemingly “colorblind” discourses of sexual regulation. This query raises a large question. In what ways, that is, should scholars analyze race in the face of its seeming absence as a category? I pursue this question as much by reading across these books as much as by reading in them. I also, at points, connect to other scholarly conversations to further the initial query.
Make Yourself Gods is in many ways a meditation on Mormon racialization. With a focus on the late nineteenth century, Coviello dissects the racializing logic with which dominant Anglo-Protestants regarded Mormon practices of plural marriage. “What happens to ‘race,’” Coviello asks, “if we imagine it to be forged as much by rival conceptions of godhead as by the imperatives of settler colonialism?”[2] The perceived perversion of Mormon theology, Coviello shows, placed this group outside of whiteness in the dominant racial order. At the same time, avowing monogamy rather directly admitted this group back into the race, as Mormon-settled Utah was granted statehood after LDS leaders instituted monogamy as church practice. This is Coviello’s project: parsing the logic of how erotic normativity earned whiteness and citizenship.
Petrey’s project, while more singularly focused on sexuality and gender, begins by asserting a formative relationship between LDS regulations of race and sexuality. The book opens at the mid-twentieth century, a point at which LDS teachings earnestly conformed to mainstream sexual and gender norms. These teachings also policed the boundaries of respectable whiteness by enforcing various forms of racial segregation. In 1978, Petrey notes, church leaders formally revoked these race-based teachings and in their wake began to develop new regulations, couched in “colorblind” rhetoric, which refocused attention on the entity of the family. Church leaders developed new prohibitions against homosexuality and non-normative gender, with reference to emerging psychoanalytic theories. Petrey shows that the church’s heteronormative traditions were an historical innovation that not only reshaped LDS members’ sexuality and gender but also molded modern Mormonism. He also suggests that these sexual teachings, while seemingly race-neutral or “colorblind,” took up regulatory weight previously invested in regulating race.
This post-1978 moment of racial unmarking is noteworthy enough to draw commentary in Coviello’s book as well, particularly in an epilogue that extends the book’s analysis of nineteenth-century erotic and racial normativity into present day debates over sexuality. Echoing Petrey, Coviello similarly notes the overt shift in the LDS regulation from race to homosexuality. He similarly puzzles over how to maintain an analytic focus on race within discourses that become self-consciously “colorblind.” “The point,” Coviello writes, “is not finally that the Mormon[s] were racist but are now homophobes…. Nor is it quite that as racial normativity once was, so now is erotic normativity.” Both of these negated claims, Coviello acknowledges, rightly describe the rhetorical unmarking of race in the historical sources. And yes, the insistence in the face of this erasure must be, as Coviello tells us, that “the entangled coarticulation of race and sex…is very much with us today.”[3] Even so, Coviello illustrates this coarticulation by turning away from Mormons as now-unmarked racial subjects to focus instead on another example, the racially marked subjects of American Muslims. While certainly a prominent contemporary example of how racialization coalesces with perceived sexual and religious alterity, the puzzle remains: in what ways does Mormon erotic and religious normativity remain entangled with racial normativity?
In some ways, what Coviello offers in his project is a tracing out of how Mormons “became white,” a question which connects to the scholarly literature on the white ethnic assimilation of various outsider European nationalities. This literature shows how racially marked European nationalities assimilated into hegemonic US American whiteness to become generically white and thus racially unmarked. Defining histories in this field focus on Irish, Italian, and Eastern European Jewish immigrants, whose racial assimilation contended with nineteenth-century scientific theories of race as well as nativist US American perceptions, which claimed that there were several European races, and some were better than others. The “Celtic,” “Mediterranean,” and “Hebraic” peoples were regarded as inferior to Anglo-Saxon/Teutonic and Nordic stock. The latter, not coincidentally, comprised the dominant nationality represented among early settlers to the British colonies.[4]
In terms of ethnicity, Mormons are an odd group to include within this history.[5] Most of the early converts to this religion shared the settler history and national origins of the dominant Anglo-Protestant settlers of the United States. That is, in terms of national origins, most of the Mormons were already “white.” This group’s exclusion from hegemonic whiteness, speaking broadly, was not due to a so-called inferior European heritage but rather because of what Coviello terms “erotico-religious errancy.”[6] Of course, religion was also part of the other not-quite-white immigrants’ accommodation as Catholics and Jews to Anglo-Protestant norms, but scholars have tended to focus on ethnic otherness over religious alterity as the salient social category for analyzing white ethnic assimilation.[7] The case of Mormon not-whiteness rested in a rather singular form on their counter-normative religious practice of plural marriage.
The era’s establishment Protestants wrote prolifically about how Mormon plural marriage made this group not white. An 1855 editorial in Putnam’s Monthly offers a typical diatribe. Monogamy, according to these authors, was “‘a law written in the heart’ of our race”:
Monogamy does not only go with the western Caucasian race, the Europeans and their descendants, beyond Christianity, it goes beyond Common Law. It is one of the primordial elements out of which all law proceeds…. It is one of the elementary distinctions—historical and actual—between European and Asiatic humanity.[8]
Plural marriage placed the Latter-day Saints on the other side of a civilizational distinction between whiteness and “Asiatic humanity.” Coviello cites additional Anglo-Protestant commentators who specified these associations by describing the Mormons as “savage,” “Oriental,” “Persian,” Moorish,” “African,” and “Mohammedan.”[9] The problem was not only that Mormon promiscuity made them uncivilized; more perniciously, their lack of sexual and moral restraint made them primitive and thus actively un-whitened. Here again, authors of this era made the connections explicit: ordered civilization poised delicately on the unique capacity of white men for monogamy. Mormon bigamy, by releasing white male sexual restraint, threatened to actively un-civilize not only the Mormons but also the entire nation.
At the same time, as Coviello shows, the Saints had created their own settlement of ordered law grounded in notions of divinely-ordained marriage, which the settlers themselves viewed as an expression of their racial superiority as a “white and delightsome people.” None of these parallels to the nation’s established governance made the Mormons appear less of a civilizational threat. Indeed, they were evidence for unacceptable absence and excess: Mormons had no religion—they were immoral and degenerate—and they simultaneously had too much religion, with a “theocratic” regime incompatible with a nation that claimed to have drawn a clear line between religious and secular power.
Arguably, Mormons became white—or at least white enough—through the LDS church’s official vow to monogamy. In 1890, Mormon president Wilford Woodruff issued a manifesto that renounced plural marriage and prohibited such unions among the Saints. The church’s reversal on these teachings also had remarkably quick effects, paving the road for a vote in Congress to accept Mormon-settled Utah into the union as a state. The now-white Mormon men could be virtuous citizens.
It’s worth pausing to take in how rhetorically explicit nineteenth-century Anglo-Protestant authors were about the racial boundaries of morality, marriage, and citizenship. Whiteness was marked with clear lines, which also delineated the beginning and end to ordered law, civilization, religion, morality, manhood, and monogamy. Historian Gail Bederman and others have fleshed out the ways that this discourse constructed the superiority of “white manhood” in and through a language of boundedness, measure, order, and restraint.[10] These signs of “civilization” distinguished whiteness and the categories that effectively stood in for whiteness (ordered law, civilization, etc.) from the perceived dis-order and unrestraint of primitive, and thus non-white, subjects.
A central inquiry of Make Yourselves Gods is to show how the Anglo-Protestant project of creating a tidy sexual, racial, and moral order also continues to shape the moral project of twentieth-century secularism. Coviello is most interested in the way that this later project of secularism erases a previously explicit religious and moral standpoint.
As I read Tabernacles of Clay, I was far more taken by a different erasure. When the nineteenth-century civilization-defending rhetoric is lined up against twentieth- and twenty-first century counterparts, the more glaring disappearance is not religion but race. If “the problem of the twentieth-century is the problem of the color line,” as W. E. B. Du Bois has famously argued, then a significant component of that problem is the rhetorical erasure of the color line through the discursive unmarking of a white racial standpoint. Tabernacles of Clay is centrally focused on chronicling the invention of twentieth-century spiritual heteronormativity. Around the edges of history, the book also alludes to how this invention of religious heteronormativity has worked to fill in the rhetorical absence of race-talk. My question is, in what ways does religious heteronormativity also take up a rhetorically erased white racial standpoint?
To be sure, addressing this question is not Petrey’s project. But it is a question raised squarely in the first two chapters of Tabernacles, which trace the history of LDS “racial purity” doctrines as a backdrop to the emergence of “the homosexual” as a subject of church regulation. “As heterosexuality became the exclusive feature of an authorized marriage,” Petrey notes, “race fell away as a defining norm for who could marry whom.”[11] This change in marriage teaching, Petrey notes, also corresponded to a new conception of foundational human difference as rooted in binary sex, giving rise to a “‘color-blind’ theology [which] rested on a new universal difference between male and female that transcended formerly fixed racial boundaries.”[12] Heterosexuality, rather than racial purity, became the central norm defining licit marriage for LDS teachings after the 1970s.
While there are various ways to interpret the significance of this shift, I am persuaded that the newer heteronormative teachings, while seemingly race-neutral or “colorblind,” take up regulatory weight previously and explicitly invested in maintaining white racial superiority. Thinking along these lines draws from the labor of critical race theory to highlight precisely the ways that late-twentieth-century discourses of racial neutrality, inclusivity, and progress have operated to obscure and perpetuate systematic white supremacy and white privilege. Julian Carter takes this work in the history of sexuality to investigate how the language of sexual normality in the early twentieth century took up and unmarked a previous era’s racially marked project of advancing white civilization. Carter argues that “normality discourse,” particularly as focused on heterosexual marriage and family, reframed “racially loaded dreams for the reproduction of white civilization in the language of romantic and familial love.”[13] The disciplines for nurturing a happy, gender-complementary, two-parent, aspirational middle-class household also worked to solidify bourgeois whiteness under the sign of the “normal.”[14]
The race-mute disciplines of heterosexual normalcy echo across late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century defenses of heterosexual marriage, which take up a similar project of reproducing white civilization under the nostalgic register of “tradition.” The LDS church leaders’ 1995 “The Family” Proclamation, which Petrey discusses at length, serves as an instructive example. The Proclamation, as it was referenced among LDS members, was issued alongside scores of similar official statements released in the late 1980s and 1990s by organizations of the Christian Right and by conservative Protestant denominations. They responded to shared political concerns about increasing social tolerance for homosexuality, and the shared aim of the official statements was to support heterosexual marriage, binary gender roles, and the “traditional family.”
The Proclamation makes no reference to race, but neither does it explicitly name homosexuality or non-normative gender. What it offers is a creedal affirmation of the divinely-ordered nuclear family. It proclaims a “divine plan of happiness” for marriage in which gender is an “essential characteristic,” and children are born “within the bonds of matrimony, and…reared by a father and mother who honor marital vows with complete fidelity.”[15] Husbands and wives are enjoined to employ the “sacred powers of procreation” and to rear their children “as equal partners” and “in love and righteousness” with gender-complementary responsibilities in which fathers “preside” and “provide” while mothers “nurture.”[16] The Proclamation’s tone is resolutely positive, with only a slight dip near the close: “We warn that the disintegration of the family will bring upon individuals, communities, and nations the calamities foretold by ancient and modern prophets.”[17] This, as Petrey notes in his analysis of the text, is the specter of civilizational destruction. Placed in larger contexts, it is a warning against accepting gay rights; in the immediate context of the text, it directly warns against non-marital sex, abusive relationships, and the failure “to fulfill family responsibilities.”[18]
The linchpin of civilization, formerly the monogamous white man, is now an entity called “the family.” In place of explicit racial hierarchies as the underpinning to this civilizational project, we find gendered, middle-class domesticity. While homosexuality was certainly a specter against which to define the divinely ordered family, this creedal affirmation of the nuclear family also serves as a coded diatribe against the perceived “tangle of pathology” within Black families, a problem linked in stigmatizing and racially-coded rhetoric with inverted gender roles, unwed parenthood, absent fathers, and the failure “to fulfill family responsibilities.”[19] The disciplinary apparatus to shore up the heterosexual nuclear family does double duty as a disciplinary apparatus to solidify bourgeois white racial power.
Whiteness, like secularism, is often defined wholesale in terms of absence and neutrality and is positioned implicitly against marked—but absent—categories of Blackness, color, and “race” altogether. My reflections in this essay respond to the provocation I found between these two books, and that provocation pushed me to rethink and to reframe what I found in them. What I offer in this essay does not say definitively how to understand the relationship between racial and erotic normativity any more than it is a definitive answer about where to locate race-talk when it appears to drop out of a given discourses. I, too, leave puzzles unresolved. Rather than an answer, I offer a partial breadcrumb trail for further thinking about how scholars of religion might attend to the saliency of race in sites of its unmarking. This unmarking signals in some ways that the subjects of a discourse have “become white,” in that they have—or are imagined to have—transcended race. But this unmarking can also signal something broader about the way that that aspirational post-racial societies deal with continued racism by folding it evasively into other categories, which administer racialized regulation in terms that appear race-neutral precisely because of the way those terms naturalize and normalize white racial dominance.
[1] John Green, “Mormon Church: Not so fast, gays. We still stand for ‘traditional’ marriage,” AMERICAblog, July 2, 2015.
[2] Peter Coviello, Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 218.
[3] Ibid., 266.
[4] Nell Painter, The History of White People (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010). See also David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1999); Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995); Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); and Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey From Ellis Island to the Suburbs (New York: Basic Books, 2005).
[5] For further work on the construction of Mormon whiteness, see also: Max Perry Mueller, Race and the Making of the Mormon People (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017); W. Paul Reeve, Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); and Joanna Brooks, Mormonism and White Supremacy: American Religion and the Problem of Racial Innocence (New York; Oxford University Press, 2020).
[6] My use of “singular dynamic” follows the framework for analyzing interlocking dynamics of race, class, and gender as influentially theorized by Patricia Hill Collins.
[7] An exception to this trend may be found within Tisa Wenger’s Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017).
[8] “The Mormons,” Putnam’s Monthly Magazine of American Literature, Science and Art 5, no. 27 (March 1855): 234.
[9] Coviello, 9, 178.
[10] Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917, Women in Culture and Society ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 23–44.
[11] Taylor Petrey, Tabernacles of Clay: Sexuality and Gender in Modern Modernism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020), 52.
[12] Ibid., 48, 51–52.
[13] Julian B. Carter, The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 1880–1940 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 6.
[14] Ibid., 15; 75–117.
[15] The First Presidency and Council of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “The Family: A Proclamation to the World,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, September 23, 1995, Salt Lake City, Utah.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Ibid.
[19] “Tangle of Pathology” is a chapter title in the 1965 federal study of “the Negro Family” conducted by Daniel P. Moynihan, which has been widely critiqued by African American feminists in particular. For a broader history, see: Dianne M. Stewart, Black Women, Black Love: America’s War on African American Marriage (New York: Seal Press, 2020).
Heather White is a Research Associate and a Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion, Gender and Queer Studies in the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School. Heather is the author of Reforming Sodom: Protestants and the Rise of Gay Rights (University of North Carolina Press, 2015) and co-editor (with Bethany Moreton and Gillian Frank) of Devotions and Desires: Histories of Sexuality and Religion in the Twentieth-Century United States (University of North Carolina Press, 2018). Follow her on Twitter @Heather_R_White.