Every time you kick 'Mormonism', you kick it upstairs: you never kick it downstairs. The Lord Almighty so orders it.
racial innocence is actually a term that comes from legal scholarship. That basically this notion of sin and innocence, the simple version that started materializing in the 19th century, is transported into legal reasoning. The idea that a white person is not responsible and shouldn’t be “harmed” in any way by legislative or judicial actions and segregation and structural inequality, right? So, we see it in the 1950s and the 1980s, around US Supreme Court decisions, around desegregation of schools, around affirmative action, where they say, “Oh, no, we can’t apply this remedy because it would hurt this white person.” And they’re innocent. They didn’t hurt anyone.
And so, I think, just to return your original question, Tim, how do we have these conversations, how do we translate them? For me, the spirit of it that is most that makes sense for me is in a spirit of shared responsibility. These are not conversations about who’s on the Lord side who. This is not you’re in and you’re out. It’s like we have work to do. I feel we have work to do. My understanding has been changed. It’s about doing through your actions. It’s about showing up where it matters with your money and your body. Right? And others will notice and follow.
So, let's start with sin. So, in the book, I talked about early Christian theology. And when I say early, I mean through the 1800s. Calvinism, a lot of the theological wellsprings from which Joseph Smith threw. It had a notion of sin that was much more rich and complicated than the one we teach in primary. And we get a sense of it in some of the higher teachings in Mormonism and some of the language about being free from the sins of your generation, right? So, we get a sense of it there. But sin was understood by early Protestant theologians, as early Christian theologians, it's just something we're born into as humans. It's a condition, right? I mean, it's the natural man that's an enemy to God, right? So, as created beings, we operate in a material sphere that is flawed, that is not yet exalted, that where there are just mistakes, there are accidents, people are hurt badly, people can lose their lives, laws are broken. And that's the sphere we move in. So, sin is the condition that defines us all. And achieving redemption from sin in early theology was about covenant with a community, to look out for the community and do your best to hold each other accountable and you transact through the redemption of Jesus Christ, right? So, it was a collective understanding. In the 19th century, that gets really rationalized, as what I call it is individualized and emptied out. So, we move to an idea of sin that's less about belonging to a community that struggles than it is about you individually did something wrong. You put your hand in the cookie, you stole a cookie from the cookie jar, right? You didn't pay your tithing. You killed someone, you coveted your neighbor's spouse. That individualized notion of sin. And then, churches offered a notion of redemption. That was if you come to church in a transactional way, you'll be forgiven of that, right? You show up. You pay your tithing or give your offerings every week and be a good citizen and don't say bad words and you're safe. You're check. But the downside of that is that sin evacuates us of have a much deeper sense of moral responsibility and culpability. It makes it impossible for us to conceive of, everybody's caught up in something wrong. We're all caught up in something wrong, right? And that is the scale of moral imagination we need to understand the extent of racism, right? So, sin is the structure and condition of humankind. Racism is the structuring condition of human life in the US in the 20th and 21st centuries. It's just the way it is. And it was made that way. It came into being through a set of deliberate choices, millions of them to privilege white over black. But it's a system. It's a condition. And the only way out is through choosing out and choosing out in community.
A student of mine said, “Oh, yes,” he said, “Racism is not a character flaw. It’s a system.” It’s not a character flaw. It’s not you’re a bad person because you harbor some deep dark secret. You are part of something much bigger than you unknowingly, maybe sometimes knowingly, that benefits you because of your race. We live in racist systems. They precede us.
racism isn’t a character flaw. It’s a system that allocates life chances based on your race. And the idea that race is not a real thing. This is something that scholars in ethnic studies and in social sciences in the academy have been talking about for decades. Whiteness is a fake idea. These categories of racial identification understanding came into being. We can pinpoint the moments in history when they come into being, when these words start being used in the way they’re being used now. They haven’t existed from the dawn of time this way, right? They became a shorthand in the 17th and 18th centuries where people could go into a really complicated reality and sort it out, right? Imagine you’re in Virginia in 1720 and you have people from everywhere flooding into this place, and race became the shorthand through which people could say, “You play this role. You play this role. I dominate you, you dominate them,” right? So, it was color coding almost to sort out complicated social realities.
So, but if you look at it, there’s no gene for race. Different people have counted as white over time, right? There was a time in history, in US history, when Irish people were not considered white. Southern Europeans were not considered white until they demonstrated through their actions by opting in and supporting the white majority and discriminated against or differentiating from black people that they belonged, right? So, that’s a helpful term as well.
“When someone asks me about it and what it means, I quietly say—‘Mormon means more good.’ (The Prophet Joseph Smith first said this in 1843; see Times and Seasons, 4:194; Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, pp. 299–300.). . . When I have seen the word Mormon used in the media to describe us—in a newspaper or a magazine or book or whatever—there flashes into my mind his statement, which has become my motto: Mormon means “more good.”
I feel certain that if, in our homes, parents will read from the Book of Mormon prayerfully and regularly, both by themselves and with their children, the spirit of that great book will come to permeate our homes and all who dwell therein. The spirit of reverence will increase; mutual respect and consideration for each other will grow. The spirit of contention will depart. Parents will counsel their children in greater love and wisdom. Children will be more responsive and submissive to the counsel of their parents. Righteousness will increase. Faith, hope, and charity — the pure love of Christ — will abound in our homes and lives, bringing in their wake peace, joy and happiness.
What happens when a religious group discovers that it’s spent 200 years assimilating to an America that no longer exists? As their native country fractures and turns on itself, Mormons are being forced to grapple with questions about who they are and what they believe.
Though the Church has never claimed prophetic infallibility, Smith says that for many orthodox believers, the faith is “either true or it’s not—the Church can’t make a mistake; the Church can’t back off; the Church can’t fix something that’s problematic.” Mormon leaders are afraid that if they apologize for the racism of past prophets, she speculates, they will undermine their own authority.
When I talk with my fellow Mormons about what our faith’s third century might look like, one common fear is that the Church, desperate for allies, will end up following the religious right into endless culture war. That would indeed be grim. But just as worrisome to me—and perhaps more likely—is the prospect of a fully diluted Mormonism.
Can a member be a Democrat and a good Mormon? That one makes me smile, because if the members who ask it could travel to some countries of the world and meet faithful members of the Church who belong to their national communist parties I fear their blood pressure might be permanently damaged.