All Abraham's Children: Changing Mormon Conceptions of Race and Lineage - Hardcover

Mauss, Armand L.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0252028031 ISBN 13: 9780252028038

Verlag: University of Illinois Press, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

All Abraham’s Children is Armand L. Mauss’s long-awaited magnum opus on the evolution of traditional Mormon beliefs and practices concerning minorities. He examines how members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have defined themselves and others in terms of racial lineages.
Mauss describes a complex process of the broadening of these self-defined lineages during the last part of the twentieth century as the modern Mormon church continued its world-wide expansion through massive missionary work.
Mauss contends that Mormon constructions of racial identity have not necessarily affected actual behavior negatively and that in some cases Mormons have shown greater tolerance than other groups in the American mainstream.
Employing a broad intellectual historical analysis to identify shifts in LDS behavior over time, All Abraham’s Children is an important commentary on current models of Mormon historiography.

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Armand L. Mauss, a professor emeritus of sociology and religious studies at Washington State University, is the author of The Angel and the Beehive: The Mormon Struggle with Assimilation, and Social Problems as Social Movements, and the coeditor of Neither White nor Black: Mormon Scholars Confront the Race Issue in a Universal Church.

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All Abraham's Children

Changing Mormon Conceptions of Race and Lineage

By ARMAND L. MAUSS

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

Copyright © 2003 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-252-02803-8

Contents

Preface....................................................................
xi
1. The Mormon Missionary Impulse and the Negotiation of Identity...........
1
2. Mormons and Israelite Lineage...........................................
17
3. From Lamanites to Indians...............................................
41
4. The Return of the Lamanites.............................................
74
5. Old Lamanites, New Lamanites, and the Negotiation of Identity...........
114
6. Christian and Mormon Constructions of Jewish Identity...................
158
7. Mormons and Secular Anti-Semitism.......................................
191
8. The Curse of African Lineage in Mormon History..........................
212
9. The Campaign to Cast Off the Curse of Cain..............................
231
10. Reprise................................................................
267
Appendixes.................................................................
A. Notes on Library and Personal Sources...................................
279
B. Supplementary Tables for Measuring Mormon Beliefs about Jews and 
Blacks.....................................................................
286
C. Path Diagrams as Summaries of the Formation of Mormon Attitudes toward 
Jews and Blacks............................................................
289
References.................................................................
297
Index......................................................................
331

CHAPTER 1

The Mormon Missionary Impulseand the Negotiation of Identity

Even if politically imbalanced, conversion encounters are alwaystwo-sided, and the social and intellectual dynamics of each campaffect the outcome.

—Robert W. Hefner, 1993

Several story lines are intertwined in this book. At the most abstractlevel, one story illustrates the power of religious ideas and human behavioron each other, indeed on the operational definition of reality itself. It is anoft-told story, but this version shows how the followers of the nineteenth-centuryAmerican prophet Joseph Smith created a spiritual and ideologicalworld within which they encountered and attempted to convert various peoples.In the process, these ideas and the ongoing reconsiderations of theirmeaning changed both the Mormons and their converts. Another story lineimplicates religious ideas in the creation of racial prejudice and invidious ethnicdistinctions. This, too, is an old story, but the Mormon version is muchmore complex than most, and it reveals some profound unintended consequences.Still a third story explores the construction and reconstruction ofvarious peoples' identities. Ethnic, religious, and even family identities arenot created in a vacuum but are the products of negotiations across timebetween peoples—often peoples of unequal power, sometimes mutuallyhostile peoples. The identities at stake here are not only that of the Mormonsthemselves but also those of certain other peoples with special definitions intraditional Mormon religious teachings.

I ardently hope that the facts, figures, and details in this book will notobscure these underlying stories that I am trying to tell. They are importantstories, quite apart from the academic trappings that occasionally encumberthem here. Stories about human beings and their institutions always involvethe discovery of paradoxes and contradictions. One of the contradictionsin the Mormon case is found in the juxtaposition of two generalhistorical realities: Mormonism has traditionally taught particularistic doctrinesfavoring some ethnic groups over others, yet the church has always hadan extensive proselyting program with a focus intended for all peoples everywhere.These two tendencies have remained in dialectical tension throughoutMormon history, and each has affected and modified the other. Most observersseem to have noticed only the impact of the first on the second—thatis, how (until recently) traditional doctrines have channeled Mormon missionaryefforts toward some societies (those in northwestern Europe, LatinAmerica, Polynesia, or the North American aboriginal peoples) and away fromothers (for example, societies with large populations of blacks).

While these two general tendencies are, of course, always acting on eachother, this book gives more attention than most to the impact of the secondon the first—namely, the universalistic missionary program's impact on traditionaldoctrines. This is the reciprocal relationship between ideas and behaviorto which I referred at the beginning: If religious doctrines and otherideas are expressions of the cultural settings from which they emerge, theyalso reflect back on those cultures—though perhaps only selectively—toinfluence the religious, social, and political behavior of the people. In thisstory line, the reader will see the overarching intellectual presence of MaxWeber, whose extensive works on the connections between religious ideologyand behavior have influenced a century of scholarship. In the chaptersto follow, there is more than one illustration of Weber's underlying themeof the reciprocal influences of ideas and experience in human history.

Of special interest here is the account of the development of religious ideasin response to proselyting experience—the unintended consequences, inparticular, of the ambitious Mormon missionary program, which graduallytransformed the Latter-day Saints from a "peculiar people," preoccupied withinvidious divine distinctions among lineages, into a worldwide movementembracing all humankind as "Abraham's children." The moral and spiritualconcomitant of this ideological transformation was the refinement of theLatter-day Saints' own understanding of universal kinship in the gospel ofJesus Christ. We are thus presented with the inspiring irony that a modern,universalistic vision of the spiritual potential in all peoples should emergefrom the parochial nineteenth-century Mormons' vision of themselves as achosen lineage.

Although not well known to non-Mormons, traditional Latter-day Saint(LDS) doctrine defined most of today's Mormons as literal descendants ofone of the ancient twelve tribes of Israel, primarily the tribe of Ephraim. Thisdesignation was part of an implied arrangement of various contemporarypeoples, by divine plan, into ancient lineages from most favored to least favored.Descendants of Ephraim stood at the top, as most favored, while descendantsof Cain were least favored, having been singled out for a specialcurse that prevented them from holding the priesthood until very recenttimes. American Indian peoples, as descendants of both Manasseh andEphraim, stood near the top in favored status, as did the Jews (descendantsof Judah), who provided the lineage for the Messiah himself. Descendantsof the remaining Israelite tribes, some of whom are scattered throughout theworld, were apparently yet to be identified or to come forth as a distinct peoplebefore the return of the Messiah; nevertheless, they had been understoodas enjoying favored lineages by virtue of sharing in the special covenant thatGod made with their ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Standing in a kindof neutral zone, somewhere below the Israelites but well above the descendantsof Cain, have been the "Gentiles," whom God has been able to use forhis purposes throughout history and who might, through their acceptanceof the Messiah, eventually be "grafted into" the covenant people of Israel.

Paradoxically, these ideas have always coexisted in Mormonism with themuch more general Christian teaching that the Abrahamic covenant sinceChrist has its efficacy no longer in lineage per se but rather in acceptanceof the true gospel. Through faithful adherence to that gospel, anyone of anylineage is spiritually incorporated into the family of Abraham and givenboth the blessings and the responsibilities of the "chosen people." With thepassage of time, especially in recent decades, authoritative Mormon discoursehas placed less emphasis on the salience of literal lineage and moreemphasis on the potentially universal inclusiveness of God's ancient covenantwith Abraham. As this change of emphasis continues, the logical paradoxis on the way to resolution. After all, if embracing the gospel of Christis all that really matters for full participation in the Abrahamic covenant,why should one's genetic lineage be given any salience whatsoever? Yet theearlier focus on the importance of literal Israelite lineage has remainedinfluential in the thinking of many Mormons, even into the twenty-firstcentury, seemingly as a residue of the racialist interpretations of historyonce so common in America as well as in Europe. How and when did suchideas arise in early Mormonism? What was the course of their development?What purposes did they serve?

Within weeks of its formal founding in the spring of 1830, the Church ofJesus Christ of Latter-day Saints began to dispatch missionaries in all directions.They saw themselves as heralds of a new dispensation of the gospel ofChrist, a new restoration of the ancient gospel and church, sent to preach thatgospel "to every creature," as in ancient times. Despite the most discouragingobstacles and opposition, these missionaries within a generation had visitedevery continent and nearly every major nation on earth. As of this writing,some sixty thousand LDS missionaries are now at work in 150 nations.Their numbers and methods have varied with time and place, but their messagehas always included a "call to repentance," a challenge to the inhabitantsof the earth to forsake all other religions and to embrace instead the "only truegospel" as taught by the latter-day prophets and apostles of Jesus Christ.

Such a message would not be considered by most peoples as an expressionof universal tolerance and appreciation for the world's varied races andcultures—any more than it was so considered by the Roman world to whichthe emissaries of Jesus preached two thousand years ago. Yet the apostlePaul envisioned a world outside Jerusalem, where all humankind couldbecome "the children of Abraham," without regard to original race, lineage,or culture. This Pauline vision has only gradually taken hold in Mormonismand displaced the racial exclusivism that had earlier been absorbedfrom the Anglo-American heritage of most Mormons. Of course, Christianityin general has always struggled with invidious comparisons amongracial or ethnic groups in the world. Paul and his followers had alreadyencountered this struggle in their own disagreements with the early ChristianJudaizers of ancient Palestine. Even at the end of the twentieth century,Christianity was still trying to purge itself of a pervasive, inherited anti-Semitism and from a great many other mutual ethnic hostilities amongChristian peoples themselves.

While such racialist thinking is clearly apparent also in early Mormonism,as in early America more generally, I argue that the full-fledged racialistframework of modern Mormonism arose primarily during the century afterthe arrival of the Saints in Utah. It was the product not of any particularrevelation but of a social and intellectual movement among some of Mormonism'smost powerful and articulate leaders. The public discourse of theseleaders demonstrates that they synthesized or combined certain interpretationsof LDS scripture with two important influences from outside Mormonism:British Israelism and Anglo-Saxon triumphalism. In doing so, they contributedgreatly to the emergent ethnic consciousness that Thomas F. O'Deadiscovered in his study of the Mormons at midcentury (O'Dea 1954). Theirretrospective construction of a "chosen" lineage identity also enabled themto resist the growing national and international definition of Mormons as adespicable people.

As will be seen later, although the specific content of this retrospective reconstructionof lineage has much that is unique to the Mormons, the processis far from unique. Many peoples, indeed entire nations, have constructedidealized ancestries for themselves, with or without much empirical, genealogicalevidence, as part of a larger mythological history. It is important forall peoples, but especially scholars, to understand that these constructed historiesand lineages carry their own truths and have their own purposes totallyapart from historical reality. One of these purposes typically is the creationand vindication of a favorable national or ethnic identity in which allmembers, particularly the youth, can be taught to take personal pride andfind personal honor. Another common purpose is more political: a meansof resistance against outside powers threatening domination, colonialization,assimilation, or all three. Such purposes are all apparent at different timesin Mormon history.

Two different aspects of lineage identity are considered in this study. Oneis the reciprocal relationship in Mormon history between lineage identitiesand proselyting programs—that is, how the selection of certain peoples forproselyting has been influenced by Mormon preconceptions about their lineagesand how, reciprocally, these preconceptions have been modified by thechurch's actual proselyting experience. A second and related aspect is thediscourse and the processes involved in the social construction and uses oflineage, both by missionaries and by the converted peoples. It is importantto emphasize at the outset that what follows is not intended as a general historyof the processes, relationships, or periods under discussion. Such a historyof Mormon relationships with the various ethnic groups would take farmore space than one volume could provide, and anyway I make no pretenseof expertise as a historian.

What I attempt instead is a certain sociological interpretation of historicalmaterials provided mostly by other scholars, supplemented by documentaryand survey data from my own original research. For my theoretical frameworks,as well as for any interpretations of specific episodes, my presentationtherefore draws only selectively on historical materials, though I have tried toavoid undue bias. With this strategy, I feel no need to cite every source, primaryor secondary, bearing on a given assertion or interpretation, for that onlylengthens endnotes and often results in "overkill" in trying to establish a givenpoint. Finally, let me be clear that my focus is intentionally limited to theWestern Hemisphere, where lineage constructions and negotiations amongMormons have principally occurred. I begin, however, with some comparativeexamples of identity construction and then return to the Mormon case.

Lineage and Ethnicity as Social Constructions

Lineage and ethnicity, whether of an individual or of an entire people, arepopularly understood as matters of objective "fact." When one thinks of hisor her lineage, one tends to think in simple genealogical terms: One is or isnot a descendant of a given ancestor; it is a matter of finding out from reliablerecords who were one's parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, andso on back, as far as the records will go. Similarly, whether in ordinary conversationor in our mass media, one tends to regard "ethnic group" as givenin nature: One simply is or is not Anglo-American, African American, HispanicAmerican, and so on.

Yet scholars and scientists who work with such concepts have long recognizedthe inadequacies and ambiguities of such popular understandings.Where lineage is concerned, very few people in any society have any idea whotheir ancestors were more than four or five generations back, to say nothingof five hundred or a thousand years ago. Reliable records simply have notsurvived, if they ever existed. As for ethnicity, the many migrations and invasionsthat have occurred in human history have rendered such categoriesas "ethnic group" and especially "race" increasingly imprecise and suspect.This is particularly the case in such highly assimilative societies as ancientRome and the United States, as is well attested by the recent quandary in theUnited States over how to classify and count the many citizens of mixed ethnicbackground in the official census. To be sure, various scholarly definitionsfor ethnicity or ethnic group have continued to be proposed and have provedmore or less satisfactory for some purposes; but much imprecision and uncertaintyremain in actual cases.

In the face of all this ambiguity, social scientists have come increasinglyto understand that the collective construction by a people of their own ethnicand genealogical past is probably more important than the historical andempirical realities, even if these could be scientifically determined. After all,people act on what they believe to be true and real, about themselves andabout others, rather than on what science has "shown" to be real. This principleof behavior applies at the collective level of the nation, the society, orthe ethnos, just as it does at the level of the individual or the family. The "historicalrecord" itself, as constructed across time by the scribes or oral custodiansof that record, is at least as likely to be the product as the source of apeople's collective understanding of themselves and their ethnic or genealogicalheritage. Furthermore, as often as not, the popular and especially theofficial record of the past is a retrospective reconstruction produced in theservice of the religious or political objectives of a powerful interest group ina particular era.

This process has been discovered repeatedly in the analysis, deconstruction,and critiques of the great recorded sagas of many different cultures. An importantrecent example is the work of E. Theodore Mullen Jr. on the originsof the Hebrew Pentateuch and the Deuteronomistic history of Israel (1997,82). Setting aside the long scholarly dialogues and disputations over historicityand the so-called documentary hypothesis, Mullen argues that thesebooks, in their received form, date back only to the mid-sixth century B.C.E.,for they bespeak the concerns and preoccupations of the post-exile scribesduring the period of the Second Temple and the Persian hegemony. Althoughthese scribes (e.g., Ezra and Nehemiah) doubtless had some earlier records,record fragments, and oral histories at their disposal, the Pentateuch and derivativebooks of the Hebrew Bible familiar to us (i.e., translated into modernlanguages) were products of this post-exile period (Mullen 1997, 80).

(Continues...)

Excerpted from All Abraham's Children by ARMAND L. MAUSS. Copyright © 2003 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Illinois Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0252028031
• ISBN 13: 9780252028038
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Sprache: Englisch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 368
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar