Sin, Skin, and Seed: Mistakes of Men in the Book of Mormon.

Race and the Making of the Mormon People, 2017

The nineteenth-century history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, this book argues, illuminates the role that religion played in forming the notion of three “original” American races—red, black, and white—for Mormons and others in the early American Republic. Recovering the voices of a handful of black and Native American Mormons who resolutely wrote themselves into the Mormon archive, this book threads together historical experience and Mormon scriptural interpretations. The Book of Mormon is key to understanding how early followers reflected but also departed from antebellum conceptions of race as biblically and biologically predetermined. Mormon theology and policy both challenged and reaffirmed the essentialist nature of the racialized American experience. The Book of Mormon presented its believers with a radical worldview, proclaiming that all schisms within the human family were anathematic to God’s design. That said, church founders were not racial egalitaria...

Matthew L. Harris and Newell G. Bringhurst, eds. The LDS Gospel Topics Series: A Scholarly Engagement (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2020), 69-95., 2020

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints published an online essay entitled "Book of Mormon and DNA Studies" on January 31, 2014 that conceded the failure of DNA evidence to provide affirmative support for the scripture's historical claims. Yet, the essay insists on a priority of scriptural over historical claims and offers possible reasons for the lack of genetic evidence of the ancient migrations from the Near East described in the Book of Mormon. This chapter summarizes the church's essay, the historical context behind the issues it addresses, and offers constructive and critical analysis of its claims. The chapter examines the settler colonial context out of which the Book of Mormon emerged and considers Indigenous critiques of the Book of Mormon alongside scientific analysis. The church's essay fails to engage Indigenous perspectives, ignores historical anachronisms in the Book of Mormon and avoids a discussion of oral history, archaeological, ecological, and linguistic evidence contradicting the Book of Mormon's portrayal of a white race of Nephites in ancient America. A more forthright confession of a nineteenth-century origin of the Book of Mormon and a more explicit repudiation of its racism are still needed if church leaders hope to rebuild trust with skeptical members and to establish more diplomatic and equitable relations with American Indians.

American Atheist, 2010

After a brief summary of Book of Mormon claims that are susceptible to scientific evaluation, the evidence from molecular genetics as it relates to claims that Native Americans are descended from the so-called "Ten Lost Tribes of Israel" is discussed. I previously had shown that the DNA of Native Americans relates them to various peoples of Siberia, not to Jews or other Near Eastern peoples. I examine the DNA analyses of former Mormon bishop and missionary Simon G. Southerton, who punished a book titled "Losing a Lost Tribe: Native Americans, DNA, and the Mormon Church." That book shows beyond any possibility of doubt that the DNA of Native Americans rules out the chronicles in the Book of Mormon as being actual history.

2014

Recent attention has been paid to DNA data reported in scholarly papers written by scientists external to the Book of Mormon debate but interpreted by some as the ultimate proof against the book's historicity. Others are even making claims about specific genetic lineages found in the Americas as a confirmation that the record is true. Overall, the complexities and limitations of the discipline of population genetics cannot be dismissed when attempting to use these tools to reconstruct the history of past civilizations. The questions treated herein examine the historical origins of the people described in the records of the Book of Mormon from a genetic point of view, making use of key principles of population genetics that cannot be neglected when undertaking such a study.

Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 36.4 (Winter): 238-241., 2003

Armand Mauss, professor emeritus of sociology and religious studies at Washington State University, has produced the authoritative and definitive study of the evolution of Mormon conceptions of race and lineage. As a practicing Latter-day Saint, former editor of Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, and former president of the Mormon History Association, Mauss brings together the intimacy of an insider, the empirical rigor of a social scientist, and a historian's attentiveness to change in an admirable weaving of three intertwined story lines: "the power of religious ideas and human behavior on each other," the role of "religious ideas in the creation of racial prejudice and invidious ethnic distinctions,"and the "construction and reconstruction of various people's identities." While this book is an exceptional evaluation of Mormon constructions of race and lineage, it does not fully examine the influence of LDS scriptures on racialism and prejudice in LDS thought. Mauss appears to have left a fuller exploration of the constructions of race and lineage in Joseph Smith’s cultural environment and his scriptural productions to other scholars. Given the necessity of focusing his narrative and the costs that such endeavors may entail for a practicing member of the LDS Church, this omission is understandable, even if regrettable. All Abraham’s Children is not only a book for scholars; it needs to read widely by church members and leaders alike. Mauss does a very impressive job of synthesizing four decades of research and making it accessible to lay persons as well as specialists. The book is an excellent testament to the compassion, integrity, balance, and enduring legacy of one of Mormonism’s best social scientists.

2008

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2013

For Latter-day Saints, blood is one important idiom of kinship, and of Christian worship, but not in the ways one might expect. This paper asks how the logic of the resurrected and 'perfected' body inhabits both registers, beginning with the surprisingly 'bloodless' LDS Sacrament Service. I then explore the paths by which Latter-day Saints navigate meanings of blood kinship in tension, especially attribution to the 'Abrahamic lineages'. I argue, in agreement with Armand Mauss, that contemporary Mormonism has largely shed racist readings of 'blood', but suggest that both lineage and cognatic kinship as mystery remain salient through a 'reduplicative logic' which collapses physical inheritance, agency, and revelation. This illuminates both similarities to and differences from conservative American Protestant positions, including understandings of the life of the unborn foetus and the rights and wrongs of stem cell research. One could, after all, easily imagine a whole book on American notions of blood. Carsten 2001: 31 This paper is concerned with idioms of blood as they occur in the daily life and religious thinking of American Latter-day Saints. 1 The contexts in which blood comes to mind for LDS people are various, and not all directly connected to each other. Sharing in wider American and Christian culture, Mormon conceptions often look familiar from one angle, but have a distinctive logic, which I shall try to unfold. The material presented here may be read as one gloss on a suggestion made by Janet Carsten in relation to Schneider (1968), that it is not clear that 'blood' in American kinship actually constitutes a single register, or that 'biogenetic substance' is not itself a metaphor for something else (Carsten 2001: 31). I have argued elsewhere (Cannell 2013) that both 'blood' and the 'law' are themselves historically constituted and in part religiously derived categories in the United States, and that the meaning of 'blood' cannot be divorced from its historical context. In this paper, I hope in part to show that 'blood' is not a single register even within American Mormonism, but both reflects a series of partly mutually contradictory historical positions and constitutes repeated versions of the articulation of a mystery central to Mormon religious experience.

Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, 1987