Darron T. Smith, Brenda G. Harris, and Melissa Flores
In 2019, the island nation of New Zealand suffered the worst terrorist attack in its history when one hundred Muslim worshipers were gunned down in the middle of Friday prayers (jummah) at two mosques in the city of Christ-church, leaving fi fty-one dead. This brazen terrorist attack was streamed live on social media for millions to view.1 The suspect in these slayings, Brenton Tarrant, a 28-year-old self-proclaimed white supremacist from Australia, was eventually apprehended by authorities. While shackled and in custody, waiting for justice to be served for his horrifi c crimes, Tarrant defi antly bran-dished the “white power salute” to a world audience.2
The suspected killer’s international hand display was the public’s fi rst glimpse of his twisted motives. Just minutes prior to the massacre, however, he posted a link on social media to his lengthy manifesto of hate-fi lled tropes and rants about mass immigration. Signifi cantly, his screed refer-enced Trump as a “symbol of renewed white-identity.”3 The murderer is not the fi rst person to invoke Trump’s anti-immigrant, pro-white declama-tions to justify his rampage. Indeed, he is not even the most recent.4 In the age of Trump, it has become commonplace for working-class white men to embrace the president’s obstinate conduct and enact bloody violence in its name.
This link between the normalization of white supremacy and difference intolerance can be directly correlated with the current U.S. president, though this deadly association has not fazed Trump’s colleagues or constituents.
That so many Trump supporters and surrogates either choose to not “see” or simply do not care that the president is a bigoted difference-monger is espe-cially troubling given the loud continuous identifi cation with Christianity
and Christian principles declared by these same Trump acolytes. Most Chris-tians would agree, to be a believer in Christ is to adhere to and be guided by a comportment of beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors founded on the Christian principles of charity, long suffering, and the requisite command to love thy neighbor as one’s self. If Trump and his supporters are Christian and use Christian principles to guide their lives, how is it possible for Trump rhetoric to be used in the service of justifying pro-white violence and murder? There is a clear disconnect here. And as black folk attempt to insert themselves among the white members, they fi nd an environment that is hostile to their emotional, physical and spiritual wellbeing.
The purpose of this chapter is to examine the ways in which the Republi-can Party platform and white evangelical Christian Protestant nationalism, specifi cally Mormon racial theology, interact to keep black people on the periphery of a faith that proclaims, “All are alike unto God.”5 We theorize that the apparent contradictions of injustices realized from white Mormon beliefs involve complex entanglements between the white racial frame, conservative political ideology and white European religious thought, as they apply to people of African heritage. These socially constructed frames of race, religion, and politics infl uence the understandings and actions of individuals and groups, sometimes to the detriment and violent harm of innocent others. This nexus of race, religion, and politics applied to con-temporary race relations is readily seen within the microcosm of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS Church), which has a long and troubling racist history itself.
Current Day Politics
When the forty-fi fth president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, came onto the American political scene unprepared and unfi t for the offi ce he currently holds, he was and remains completely unchecked by members of the Republican establishment, notwithstanding the fl urry of legal action against him. Since his stunning victory in 2016, Trump’s unfi ltered ban-ter, endless tweets, and extemporized interviews with media outlets such as Fox News and Breitbart News Network have given him an enormous mega-phone through which to spew his brand of white nationalism to include the defense of “Christian heritage.”
In this land of “freedom and equality,” Trump has shown an unabashed and unrestrained disregard for those different from himself. This list of those relegated by to date Trump includes blacks, immigrants, Muslims, women, veterans and prisoners of war, Gold Star families, the disabled, Mexicans, and the LGBTQ community.6 Further, the Trump administration’s inaction
on denouncing hate has consequently had a chilling effect on extremists and disaffected working-class white men in the U.S. and around the world.
The U.S. president’s failure to publicly address domestic white terror as a serious threat to national security has become a kind of symbolic justifi ca-tion of white identity politics against all those deemed not white.7 Leading the pack in support for the U.S. president are white Christian Protestants on the far right of the political spectrum.
Few will argue the fact that Trump’s behavior, judgement, and rhetoric are expressly anti-Christian, from many claims of sexual assault against him to the attacks on and condescension of those he considers different from him-self. But research analysts suggest that the more devout one is to one’s reli-gious beliefs, the stronger the correlation with xenophobia, racism(s), and, certainly in the United States, Islamophobia.8 Case in point regarding connec-tions between religious views and difference-based oppressions: When asked by Joe Heim of the Washington Post if there was anything that Trump could do that would cause him to lose the support of evangelical leaders, Liberty University president Jerry Falwell, Jr., responded with a clear “No.”9 Christian conservatives either fully endorse the racist, sexist beliefs of the leader of the free world or are willing to turn a blind eye to the damage he is causing as long as their agenda(s) (traditional marriage, prayer in school, limited gun laws, capitalistic gains over environmental sustainability, etc.) are met. Thus, despite Trump’s questionable character, he has become a potent ambassador of affi rmation for white conservative Christian causes in the United States.
And in return, they have become his most ardent supporters.
One of the more politically conservative denominations in the United States is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the LDS Church or Mormons), many of whose members practice strict devotion to what they call the “Standard Works,” which include both the Bible and the Book of Mormon as sacred, religious texts. The Mormon Church is a U.S.-based religion that emerged from nineteenth-century white Christian fundamen-talism.10 “It is the only world-recognized religion to have been born in the United States during the modern age (e.g. the age of the printing press).”11 As a uniquely American-derived tradition, Mormonism has inherited and refl ects the dominant cultural conditioning of what it means to be Ameri-can, as defi ned by characteristics, interests, values, and more associated with white male economic and societal domination.12
Trump’s language, his objectifi cation of women, and his unprecedented actions against people of color, the disabled and immigrants are all seem-ingly antithetical to many of the teachings found in the LDS faith. Still, the mostly white and LDS population of Utah voted Trump into offi ce at a whopping rate of 61 percent, and he maintains a favorable job approval
rating in the state.13 What is it about Trump (and the Republican Party, for that matter) that would cause LDS members to vote en masse for someone who does not espouse the wholesome, chaste and clean-cut image that they typically wish to portray and maintain? What’s more, how does this support among the majority white LDS congregation sit with those in the faith who are the racial Others, marginalized by the conservative right, and how then do those black people navigate this space, worshiping alongside their white brethren who likely voted for Trump? To understand these questions, the authors will use a critical phenomenological framework to explore the con-nections between race, religion and right-wing identity politics.
Christianity: The Unity of Religion and Race
To follow Jesus, according to the Bible, the greatest commandment is to love one’s neighbor as oneself, regardless of ethnic, religious, and social dif-ferences.14 And yet, the most segregated day of the week remains Sunday, as Americans readily gather in their respective silos of worship.15 The juncture of race and religion has a long and arduous history going as far back as the Crusades. As religious affi liation became less and less “visible” through the conversion process, physical features, like skin tone, eye shape, and hair tex-ture, for example, became an easy way for humans to sift through people as
“us” or “them.”16 White religious observance(s) would use binary language, thinking and doing, like white over black, light over darkness, gentile over heathen, as a way to organize and give epistemic meaning to the world.
Using these white racial frames, Mormonism would come to provide the backdrop needed to separate the world into discrete races and to justify brutality.
While the practice of Christianity advanced into places like India and Africa, so did the racial frame of whiteness as “pure,” “innocent,” and “celes-tial” while blackness was associated with “evil” and “cursed.”17 Christianity reinforced these race-based narratives through art, literature, and culture, and it was of vital importance that Christ be as far removed as possible from anything suggestive of darkness. Indeed, “the entire history of Western painting bears witness to the deliberate whitening or bleaching effort that transformed Christ from a Jew to an Aryan person.”18
Social stratifi cation by race accelerated in North America as white Chris-tian Puritans and pilgrims arrived in New England in the sixteenth century.19 In no uncertain terms, as the economic and social foundation for the United States was laid, Christianity (more specifi cally, white Christianity) infl uenced the development of racial identity formation. After the fi rst Africans arrived on the shores of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619, elite white men interpreted
the gospel of Christ in exclusionary terms, as a way to distinguish between themselves and black Africans and native peoples.
In the English settlements, “Anglo-Virginians created whiteness during the 17th century and Christianity as a religion of white people.”20 In 1667, Virginia law allowed slave owners to baptize their slaves while maintain-ing the ceremony brought no promise of freedom. This encouraged white slaveholders to instruct their slaves to embrace Christianity along with their debased status as servants to the white man. In fact, many preached that their status in life was predestined; this was especially helpful for profi teers in the service of the growing slave economy.21
Researchers have argued that colonialism and slavery produced racism;
once this form of oppression emerged in human history, it became a foun-dational aspect of Western culture.22 Thus, it is safe to conclude that in the United States, the “birth of racism [began] with religiously justifi ed exploi-tation, massacre, and war with the Native Americans—although an explicit racist ideology . . . did not fully develop until after the abolition of slav-ery”23 with black codes, Jim Crow laws, and systemic de jure and de facto racial discrimination. These white supremacist narratives were buttressed in Christianity with respect to the way it has produced racial discourse ascribed to the bodies of black men and woman as cursed by God.24
Throughout time and across the developing world, indigenous peoples were forcibly introduced to Christian theology: fi rst, to love God, and sec-ond, to love one’s fellow man.25 Decidedly, Christianity is the sine qua non of inhumanity in the gross mistreatment of native peoples and African slaves. In defense of human bondage, Christians suggested black skin was a divine punishment from God and argued Africans were a type of “sub-human,” if human at all. In condoning the massacre and displacement of Indigenous Americans, white Anglo Christians developed the concept of
“manifest destiny,” an ideology of a “chosen people” led by the Almighty to grab land and resources from coast to coast, even if it meant genocide.
These mental activities would ensure a lasting social, economic, and politi-cal structure that enabled and protected whiteness while disenfranchising people of color, African Americans more specifi cally, for centuries to come.
The Rage of the Christian Right
For about 90 percent of U.S. history, infl uential white men (clergy, law-yers, wealthy merchants and landowners, etc.) worked collaboratively and individually to promote their shared interests in white male capitalist patri-archy. This white racial framing of skin color produced social hierarchies, making it diffi cult for stigmatized minority groups in the U.S. to secure full
freedom and opportunity long denied. As some elements of systemic racism became less accepted in the public domain, the link between conservative politics and religious group identity strengthened.
Indeed, the Grand Old (Republican) Party, commonly known as the GOP, became synonymous with white Christianity in America. As a result, the white political establishment then relied on the word of God to subjugate African Americans and enforce white supremacy through political party affi liation.
The resulting laws and policies guaranteed white privilege and white male domination through education, health care, mass incarceration, housing, and the economy as well as entertainment, art, and music for years to come.
With white supremacy at the helm of the Republican Party, naturally, social justice has taken a back seat to wealth and power. Enraged white conservative politicians who perceived a threat to their race-based entitlements learned to use the law to maintain their privileges at the expense of others. Rage is not always refl ected in outward acts of physical violence. More often, it is subtle, operating through white-controlled institutions, policies, and white-imposed laws designed to disenfranchise black people at the local, state, and federal lev-els of government. These same white conservatives found allyship in the arms of the evangelical Christian church, as clergy would use religious pronounce-ments to confuse and further divide the American people.
According to the GOP website, their platform declares that they are “the party of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.”26 As Amer-icans, we rely on the Constitution as a blueprint outlining our system of government and its rules of law. Although the Constitution never mentions
“God” in the text, the Republican Party consider the document as divinely inspired, nevertheless. They fail to recognize the text as a document writ-ten by elite white men interested in preserving their property, assets, and legacy. When religiosity intersects with politics, inevitably those in posi-tions of power end up writing laws from their myopic perspective of God and country.
Although the GOP platform declares they are for human equality, denounc-ing “bigotry, racism . . . and religious intolerance,” their legislative initiatives and policies have consistently favored the rich and powerful at the expense of less fortunate Americans, many of whom are non-white. In particular, these legal agendas have devastating consequences on black and brown communi-ties who typically lack the fi nancial resources to buffer the aftermath of these GOP-instituted laws. For example, the recent repeal of important measures in the Voting Rights Act and the practice of state-sanctioned gerrymandering has allowed, even perpetuated, the enrichment of one group with more political space to enhance its own vote, effectively keeping whites in power and blacks at the bottom of the well.27 Further, GOP lawmakers routinely manipulate
their mostly white constituency in stoking racial fears and anxieties of white extinction. These political tactics confuse and incite rage from the working class to the far-right extreme elements of the party as they embrace, rather than denounce, racial bigotry and religious intolerance.
Despite its claims that “all are alike unto God,” the Mormon faith is a community of believers not immune to a legacy of racial bigotry toward peo-ple of African heritage. There are elements within Mormonism such as the concept of and belief in industry, the hard work ethic, and education/literacy as well as white male patriarchy, faith in God, and family values; the “Ameri-can dream” bootstraps narrative wrapped up in the Ameri“Ameri-can experiment in democratic rule. But this romanticism of the “American dream” metaphor is also precisely what makes it so white. And because of that, Mormonism echoes the country’s long-standing negative racial history in that the posi-tion of black LDS members in the Church remains inconsequential.
Mormon Rage against the Black Body
The rage of the GOP toward difference is shared by the Mormon Church. For more than a century, the LDS Church would not allow black males to hold the priesthood or black women to receive priesthood benefi ts including tem-ple endowments. These embodied rituals are critical to being a “good” mem-ber in full standing in the church. On June 9, 1978, then-Mormon president and prophet Spencer W. Kimball reversed the 130-year ban. The Mormon Church’s reversal of its anti-black doctrine was widely praised as signifi cant progress, away from its vestiges of institutional racism and toward racial inclusiveness. For black Mormons, the long-promised day initiated by Kim-ball was an answer to prayer. This historic LDS policy reversal set to affect the transformation of the Mormon faith from a racially divisive, parochial institution into a worldwide, universal and “color-blind” church. The uni-versality of LDS doctrine as it pertains to blacks, however, remains paradoxi-cal, especially when considering how little effort has been put into removing its large corpus of racist teachings and commentary from its early history.
In the ensuing four decades since June of 1978, the expectant jubilation surrounding the Church’s offi cial but ostensible commitment to the full accep-tance and fellowship of black folk has borne the spoiled fruit of interpersonal psychic turmoil, as some express their spiritual needs from deft white leader-ship while permitting the teachings of them as cursed. To understand the con-tradiction between unfulfi lled religious expectations of acceptance in the LDS Church and the cold reality of our contemporary racial dilemma, it is neces-sary to deconstruct the calculated alliance between white Christianity and the majority white Republican Party, as it has become one in the American mind.
Like Christian conservatives, the LDS Church believes that a traditional marriage between man and woman is the only proper and ordained mar-riage in the eyes of God. Likewise, the Republican Party platform promotes this religious view of marriage and takes political and legal action to main-tain this defi nition of marriage, thereby excluding a group of people from
Like Christian conservatives, the LDS Church believes that a traditional marriage between man and woman is the only proper and ordained mar-riage in the eyes of God. Likewise, the Republican Party platform promotes this religious view of marriage and takes political and legal action to main-tain this defi nition of marriage, thereby excluding a group of people from