As a historian of race, religion, and gender in America, Russell has centered his work primarily on the growth of Mormonism in Africa, which is the story of Africans adapting and translating Mormonism.

He has also published on a variety of aspects of race and Mormonism, ranging from his first book, the biography of Elijah Abel, the first black priesthood holder in the Mormon tradition, to the role of prophetesses informing the Mormon church in 1960s Ghana.

His second book, For the Cause of Righteousness: A Global History of Blacks and Mormonism 1830–2013, won the Mormon History Association’s Best Book award—not an easy feat. It provides, for the first time, a chronologically complete and internationally-minded history of Mormonism’s interactions with the global black community. In the book’s second half, he provides an anthology of annotated primary sources to accompany the narrative text.

Currently, Stevenson is pursuing a PhD in African studies at Michigan State University. I want to share with you a back cover endorsement for Russell’s book, written by Terryl L. Givens. “Russell Stevenson has produced a terrific compilation, invaluable as a resource and as a troubling morality tale. The array of documents compelling reveals the tragedy and inconsistency of racial attitudes, policies, and doctrines in the LDS tradition and the need for eternal vigilance in negotiating a faith that must never be unmoored from humaneness.” Congratulations, Russell, and welcome.

But that’s far too simplistic of a picture. I mean the reality is, the Latter-day Saint community, they were drawing from a number of different forces, a number of different ideas that were prevailing at the time, that had been articulated for literally centuries. You can even go back to ancient Egypt where you see some of these racial ideas being expressed as pertaining to Sub-Saharan Africans versus the Egyptians.

Latter-day Saints, as being both Mormons and Americans, opted into this discourse; they opted into these kinds of structures that defined race in American society throughout the 19th century. As a result, they created an environment in which the priesthood and temple bans could be articulated and could resonate, more importantly.

Let’s start from the beginning. What happened? Joseph Smith reveals the Book of Mormon, and what does the Book of Mormon teach us about different color skinned people, different ethnic groups? Who is eligible to receive the gospel and the ultimate blessings of exaltation?

Within a few months, we see that Phelps was flipping a page, right. He was kind of pulling a 180, and he said, “I know I said this one thing about African Americans coming to Missouri. Just so you know, I didn’t really mean that and, moreover, we are ultimately a white church. We do not allow African Americans into our church.” This is one of the earliest articulations of a discriminatory approach towards African Americans. Now, to be sure, Joseph Smith didn’t exactly adopt this approach but we do see evidence for this in some of Phelps’s writings at this point.

We do know that Joseph Smith was facing a lot of attacks for being a perceived abolitionist. In 1836, Governor Daniel Duncan sent a letter to Phelps, which was, by extension, also directed at Joseph Smith, saying, “Listen, all the persecution that you faced for being perceived as abolitionists, well, that’s your problem. And frankly, you’re guilty until proven innocent. And until that time, vox populi vox dei, the voice of the people is the voice of God.” Essentially, he was legitimizing mob conflict with the Saints over the issue of slavery.

In March of 1847, for example, we have Brigham Young going on record, not only supporting something like racial equality but also supporting black ordination to the priesthood. He was interacting with a runaway slave by the name of William McCary who was feeling ill at ease in the Latter-day Saint community, and Brigham Young said, “Listen, one of our best Elders is an African living in Massachusetts.” Brigham Young’s racism, whatever it was, did not necessarily lead him to exclusion of black people from priesthood ordination or temple ordinances. It took other events.

There is another event that took place that also played a role in forming Brigham Young’s attitude. In December of 1847, he became aware that Walker Lewis’ son, Enoch Lewis, had married a white woman and had a biracial child with him. Now, for Brigham Young, this was beyond the pale. It’s one thing to marry an African American; it’s quite another to have a child with them. You are now, in his eyes, and in the eyes of many scientists at the time, having a child who is barren and incapable of producing offspring.

We see Brigham Young trying to do this too in some of his speeches. He says, “I believe in slavery but I also believe that slaveholders in the south should treat their slaves better, that they should not abuse or beat their slaves.” Ultimately, he says, “Slavery is nothing more than moral, honorable service.” He wasn’t very good at slicing and dicing the legal terminology, but he was trying to get at the essence of this particular law. As he’s advocating for this law, he says, “I say unto you now, as a prophet,” essentially, “That the negro cannot hold one particle of priesthood because they are the descendants of Cain.” And then he expressed other ideas about race and about slavery, and he also reiterates his belief that interracial couples are deserving of the capital punishment. In this speech, you see him make public in ways that he had not done before these ideas about race, about priesthood ban, about servitude. Now, you asked the question, “Does this debate end up informing the priesthood or temple ban?” I’m inclined to think that the priesthood and temple ban existed well before this point, dating back to 1847. Maybe this provided a venue in which these ideas could be articulated but in and of itself, it wasn’t a causative factor in bringing this ban into being. Now, you mentioned that there was another individual who was debating Brigham Young.

But for Orson Pratt, he did believe in a racial curse. He believed that Africans were cursed, and he believed that their bodies were cursed. However, he did not see it as the job of humanity to enforce that curse. He said, “Listen, that curse is going to be carried out by God. That’s His problem. That’s His business. That’s not our business.” But again, Pratt did believe that peoples of African descent were socially inferior, that they were somehow less worthy in the pre-mortal life, but that slavery was a line too far.

Another example is someone like James Moyle, who was fresh from the UK; the United Kingdom had recently abolished slavery throughout all of its territories. He was coming from a place that Africans should not be enslaved; they should be seen as humans like anybody else.

But individuals like Orson Pratt and James Moyle were outliers. And the reason I highlight that is to say even though we have these individuals who are challenging the status quo, even though they’re inviting people to see it in a different way, the power structure is in a different place and breaking in a different direction. And because of that, men like Brigham Young and John Taylor and others feel comfortable expressing these things in public. We have lots of evidence of Latter-day Saints pushing back against comments made by church leaders, Joseph Smith and Brigham Young alike. The fact that these comments were not widely challenged tells us something about the state of the Latter-day Saint community at large.

I think now would be a good place to say we need to look at current research. At the time that Elder Holland and Elder Oaks were speaking, this research had not been published. This was all within the last decade.

What we can do with this particular question of, “Why?” right, at the very least, we can say, “All right. Well, whatever one thinks about how God understands the ban or understands its perpetuation, we can speak to why Brigham Young or John Taylor or others thought the ban was necessary.” As a historian and as a researcher, I see that as being first and foremost my duty, saying, “All right. You can craft your theology as you see fit, but here is why those who established the policy and perpetuated the policy,” or if you want to call it a doctrine or if you want to call it a practice, whatever word you want to use, each and every single one of those policy doctrine practice makers had doctrinal underpinnings and ideas that they believed supported those practices.

Brigham Young absorbed this idea at some point over the course of his life, and it’s very easy to see how he would have. Others, they believed that African Americans were descended from Ham. Now, Ham had, according to Old Testament texts, seen his father Noah naked and was therefore cursed by Noah. And for many people, they saw the name Ham, in Hebrew, as meaning burnt or black, so it must be connected to peoples of African descent. But again, as it happens, the Masoretes almost certainly mis-transcribed that particular word. And what that name exactly meant, we’re not sure. but that was the theory that Parley P. Pratt invoked when he was discussing William McCary.

Now, towards the end of the 19th century, we have other Latter-day Saint leaders invoking ideas about pre-mortal life, right, saying, “Okay. Well, this idea about being descended from somebody and, therefore, being unworthy, that seems to me to be unjust. So surely they did something in pre-mortality to merit this kind of cursing.” B.H. Roberts tries to walk a line; he tries to say, “Well, no, being black, it’s a special trial, right. It’s a burden they have to carry, and, therefore, they’re going to have access to special blessings because of this spiritual burden.”

You have all these Latter-day Saint general authorities trying to make sense of this. And Brigham Young, he rejected the pre-mortality thesis entirely. He wouldn’t have it. When Lorenzo Young brought it up to him, he said, “That’s simply not true. It is because of Cain.” And then by the mid-20th century, you begin to see Latter-day Saint leaders adopting more of the agnostic perspective, saying, “Okay. Well, for reasons known only to God but unknown to man, peoples of African descent were banned from holding the priesthood or temple office.” These same leaders did mention the pre-mortality, but they didn’t necessarily connect it to the ban as earlier figures had.

You have this matrix of different ideas trying to explain this thing, and, eventually, it has come into being that, “Listen, we don’t know.” That is now the established consensus within the Mormon community. And then, of course, you have historians who say, “Well, we actually know more than maybe we’ve supposed that we do. We have documents X, Y, and Z; we’ve got this set of meeting minutes. We may not know everything that we want to know about it. We may not know when Brigham Young specifically flipped from supporting black ordination to opposing black ordination, but we do know that there were reasons ascribed to it and that there was some kind of historical development, and that church leaders believed to have specific reasons given to them by revelation.”

All of that is to say that we need to recognize all of these reasons that are given to support this particular practice-doctrine-policy. They were rooted in longstanding intellectual discourse throughout the western world and the Latter-day Saints absorbed it. That’s how cultures work: we absorb things, and we pick up ideas from our surrounding communities both good and bad.

But when we use these theories and these explanations, we need to be very particular about the timing to which these reasons and explanations should be attached. For example, if you were to talk about the Latter-day Saints in Missouri in the 1830s versus the Latter-day Saints in Utah in the 1850s, you need to use very different theories for explaining why they viewed race in the way that they did. I mean after all, if we really believed that the priesthood ban had something to do with protecting the Saints, well, here you have the Saints practicing polygamy, which is seen as horrific to politicians up and down the eastern seaboard. Hardly a day goes by where somebody doesn’t talk about the Mormons’ awful practice of polygamy. So why is it, I would ask, that the Latter-day Saints were so doggedly committed to engaging this practice that would almost prove their undoing in the 1880s and 1890s, but they’re unwilling to integrate African Americans? To me, this idea that the Saints have to protect themselves at all costs from any particular criticism, in general, doesn’t hold water, especially during the Utah period.

For example, Mormonism does send missionaries to South Africa in the early 1850s. But in general, they do not preach to black Africans. They preach primarily to Africaners and the English. We know that some African women were baptized at that time, as well as some others, but, in general, that was not the practice. You see the Saints sending missionaries to Asia to Europe, but, again, it is predominantly based on their sense of common European descent. You see a handful of indigenous Indians being baptized but that was not the purpose for sending missionaries there. The purpose was primarily to preach to British colonists. You really see the Latter-day Saint community have to deal with the idea of a globalizing church when they begin to send missionaries to Brazil. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, the established policy was to send missionaries to the deep south of Brazil because that is where the German colonizers were. And they had a reputation for not inter-marrying with anyone of African descent. They were racist enough that the Latter-day Saints could trust that they would not have African ancestry. But eventually, you find that there just aren’t that many Germans and it’s really hard to run a church based on such a small enclave of people. So you begin to have to look elsewhere. And you have people who look typically European but, in Brazil, it is genuinely a melting pot. You’ve got indigenous Americans, and you’ve got peoples of African descent. You’ve got all these different communities intermingling together and the church is not entirely certain how to handle it.

But one thing that church leaders knew is that “we have the best genealogists in the country, and  we are committed to finding out people’s ancestry.” So they sent genealogists down to Brazil and asked every single priesthood and/or temple endowment applicant to submit their genealogy. This practice would take place in South Africa as well. Essentially, you were deemed to be African until you were proven to be European. If you could not trace all your ancestry out of either Brazil or South Africa, then you were considered to be African and, therefore, you were ineligible to either receive priesthood office or the temple endowment/ceilings. Eventually, this proved to be unsustainable because how many people could actually provide that kind of documentation? Relatively few. And you even have some people trying to game the system, producing documentation that is not entirely viable, but yet it’s still documentation, so they can, in fact, pass as white, both typically and in documentation.

It’s almost difficult to imagine someone sitting there and saying, “Wait, so I’m going to be asked to essentially be a second-class citizen?” And understand that Brazil had a reputation by this point of being the “land of racial democracy.” This is something they celebrated about themselves because everyone is everything. Everyone’s a little bit African, everyone’s a little bit European, everyone’s a little bit Italian, perhaps, a little bit Portuguese. We are racially equal. At least that’s the rhetoric, right. Now, whether that was true in practice is another issue. But that is certainly how Brazil branded itself. There was even a statue that was modeled after an African wet mother. It was called “Black Mother,” and it was meant to communicate the unity between the black and white races in early 20th century Brazil. So understand that the church was sort of pushing against the trend in Brazil at this time. Whereas others were celebrating racial democracy, they were very committed to preserving a Euro and indigenous-descended priesthood body.

Lowry Nelson is working as an academic, and, one day, he receives correspondence from Heber Meeks, who was the church leader tasked with scoping out the potential of having a mission in Cuba. Over the course of this correspondence, Lowry Nelson realizes that there was, in fact, a priesthood and temple ban in place. He had always known that Brigham Young was racist in one way or another, he had always known that there were various things said by church leaders, but he never realized that this was an institutionalized practice.

He begins to write letters to the First Presidency and said, “Listen, this is outrageous. How dare we send a mission down to Cuba when we’re going to be focusing on those of pure blood, as it were.” Well, he didn’t receive a very warm response. The First Presidency rejected all of his arguments and the specifically said, “If we were to allow peoples of African descent to receive these ordinances, it would encourage intermarriage, and we just cannot have racial intermarriage.” There were several states in the United States at that time that explicitly outlawed intermarriage, to be sure. So with that, Lowry Nelson writes an article for the nation, and in this, he publicly calls out the LDS church for embracing racist dogma. As an academic, he was certainly on the more, what we would call today, the more progressive wing of things. He would have been on the edge of society. You could find lots of white Americans who had vehemently disagreed with this or that aspect of his arguments, right, especially in the south, but even in some parts of the north as well.

He became increasingly disturbed with Mormonism’s racial practices, and he sees it as his duty and his responsibility to call out his faith community. If you read some of his comments at the time, he saw himself as a faithful dissenter. He genuinely believed in the beauty of Mormonism, but he saw this as being a really ugly and awful mole that should be left in the 19th century.

He was in tandem with other LDS intellectuals at the time as well, like Fawn Brodie and Sterling McMurrin, who similarly believed in this idea that was becoming more popular, that, okay, maybe this ban was a product of the Missouri prosecutions and was kind of an effort to self-preserve to make sure that the Saints didn’t lose their lives and their property, but that was the 1830s, folks. We’re now in the 1950s, and we can forget that.

One argument he makes is truly apologetic. He goes, “We don’t discriminate. In fact, you can say that we’re more expansive than other Christian religions because …” it’s hard for me to say this. “Because the priesthood is conferred on all worthy males, unlike other Christian churches.” Blacks, by their very nature, were deemed unworthy.

But nevertheless, you have these various adherents who badly want to be associated with Mormonism in some form or fashion. It becomes so loud of a voice that even David O. McKay and the First Presidency decide to send an exploratory mission to Nigeria in the early 1960s, with the idea being that, “Okay. If these people are for real, if they’re legit, then we will send missionaries to establish an official LDS structure among them. But they will not hold the priesthood.” After this exploratory mission, both missions, both Lamar Williams and Marvin Jones come away converted to the idea of African Mormonism. Before, they were pretty skeptical, both the First Presidency and them. They were like, “Well, do these people, do they really want Mormonism, or do they just want an American handout?” But ultimately, they said, “These people want the church. Yeah. There are people who may want money but there is a core here and we need to pay attention to them.”

By 1963, however, politics had gotten in the way. John Stewart’s book, referenced earlier, had been published by this point. There was a Nigerian student attending school in California. He got his hands on a copy of this text when he attended a Mormon church. After reading it, he was livid, outraged. “How dare these people, one, say these things about Africans and, two, dare to send their missionaries to our country.” By this point, Nigeria was an independent country. There was some kind of hope towards being a cornerstone and a leader amongst the African nations, as being the most populous nation in all of Sub-Saharan Africa, for Mormons to come there and say, “Okay. Well, we will not see you as being ecclesiastical equals.” It was unacceptable to him. He writes an article in the Nigerian Outlook newspaper, and in this, he calls Mormons religious madmen who have no business coming to Nigeria. This eventually leads to any talk of Mormon missionaries being allowed into Nigeria. Scuttled. All visa applications were denied. The senior missionaries who were set to go to Nigeria were basically sent home.

It was within a few years after that that the Nigeria­–Biafra war broke out. And that was a horrific war. I mean it’s kind of the iconic African civil war in the American consciousness. You’re seeing starving babies on TV and starvation as a means of war and bombing after bombing. In many ways, it was not an ideal situation for American missionaries to be there at the time where Mormonism was really cropping up. It was in the Igbo communities of Eastern Nigeria, which also happened to be where the successionist movement of Biafra really took hold. From a military and a safety perspective, one could argue that Mormon missionaries shouldn’t have been there at all anyway. That being said, though, it’s not as though other missionaries were fearful. I mean up until the time of the Nigeria-Biafra war, the Irish Holy Ghost fathers had almost 1,500 missionaries on site in Eastern Nigeria. Could the Mormons have handled sending a few there at the time as well? Maybe, maybe not. That’s a counter-factual that we don’t need to get into here. What’s relevant to this particular conversation is that, even as you’re seeing this groundswell of criticism and opposition to Mormonism’s racial policy in the United States, you’re also seeing a groundswell of self-identification with the Mormon tradition in Nigeria and in Ghana as well.

Like I said, in South Africa, you have people like Moses Mahlangu who wants to join the church, but he is facing discrimination. It’s during the time of apartheid. He’s not having a lot of people being welcoming to his being baptized. He ends up not joining the church until 1980, but he, too, is striving to become a Latter-day Saint at that time as well.

BYU had come under heavy fire from several universities, most notably, University of Wyoming and Stanford University, for their affiliation with the LDS church and for the LDS church’s racial policy. Sporting events had become a very popular venue for black activists to express their discontent with the state of American race relations. BYU was not singular in this regard,  but that event triggered the LDS church to begin to reframe the issue. They commissioned Heber Wolsey, who was a Professor of Journalism at BYU, to go on a bit of a charm offensive. He visits church units throughout the country, he gives lectures in a number of different sites, he engages with the press quite explicitly on the issue, and he begins to reframe this less as a matter of being cursed or less as a matter of African Americans being unworthy for the priesthood and more as something that we’re doing right now, but, ultimately, is not terribly significant. He cites the stories of various African American believers who say that, “Everything is cool. Whatever it is that you’re doing with black members, I’m fine with it. I don’t see it as being essential to my ultimate salvation.” He really tries to highlight the LDS church as being a racially progressive institution.

Now, for many people, that’s a very tough sell, right, but that is the approach he’s taking. He’s trying to take control of the narrative, which is what public relations officials are trained to do. In the course of this charm offensive, he does make the comment that it’s the University of Wyoming, and Stanford, and other institutions that got this ball rolling. This is back in 1969. So at this time, the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve engaged in a vote on whether to retain the priesthood and temple ban. It was unanimous except for one person who was absent, and that was Harold B. Lee. He was away on business, and when he returned, he convinced the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve to rescind their vote, thus retaining the priesthood ban in place.

In 1970, a book by a young graduate student at Cornell, Stephen Taggart, is published, and it’s called Mormonism’s Negro Policy. Now, Stephen Taggart’s fundamental argument was that the priesthood and temple ban was the product of 1830s tensions with Missourians. He believed this was evidence that we should leave it behind—this is anachronistic. It might have served a provisional or temporary need in the 1830s, but it no longer serves that need.

Now, his book is kind of a tragic story. He ended up dying before it was published of non-Hodgkins lymphoma, and his wife had it published posthumously. But this book, for the very first time, connects the priesthood ban not to some kind of cosmic force, not to some kind of a theological reasoning, but to the situation of the here and now, right. It’s because of what the Saints experienced in Missouri, not because of divine favor. Now, his argument was limited in some ways. In fact, it was even flawed in some ways because he suggested that the ban could be attributed to Joseph Smith. As we know from evidence regarding Elijah Abel and others, that simply cannot be documented, right. We know that Joseph Smith at least authorized African American men to be ordained to the priesthood. His argument could only go so far.

Lester Bush took Stephen Taggart’s argument, and he went even further. He said, “Okay. So Taggart, he did not get it right on Joseph Smith. Rather, we should contribute this directly to Brigham Young,” and he identifies the February 1849 comments that Brigham Young made to Lorenzo Snow. But as it happens, those are not the first comments that Brigham Young made, right. We know that Brigham Young was making opposite comments in March of 1847. That article reframes this issue as an evolutionary process, right, change over time. Stephen Taggart had said, “All right. We have this moment in time in which the priesthood began in Missouri, and it has endured to the present,” whereas Lester Bush says, “Okay. Well, we have this phase of the priesthood ban, or non-priesthood ban in the case of Joseph Smith, and then we have the initial implementation of the priesthood ban by Brigham Young, and then we have the institutionalization of the priesthood ban.” He particularized into various eras, and for that reason, it was very compelling. It even made its way into the hands of various church leaders, including people like Spencer W. Kimball, who marked it up. And we know that that article, to some extent, had influence on his thinking.

I would be loathe to say that was the only article that changed things. I mean we have an article published by Newell Bringhurst in 1978 that changed Mark E. Petersen’s mind. You have all these different influences shaping various church leaders. I mean you don’t just have articles and publications—you also have the rise of the church in Brazil, and you have the onslaught of West African proselytes to Mormonism.

I often refer to the process of changing the environment as a constellation of forces colliding together to create a perfect storm in which the priesthood ban could eventually be lifted in 1978.

In the early 1970s, for example, church leaders commissioned Alex Haley to give a commencement address at BYU. Alex Haley had become famous for his work with Roots. And Roots was wildly popular among Utah Latter-day Saints because it’s all about family history, right. You’ve got Kunta Kinte going and finding out who is ancestor is. Now, as it happens, the work of Roots was heavily plagiarized and is heavily problematic. It’s one of those works that should not be seen as serious Africana scholarship, but rather it was indicative of how many white Americans were willing to come to grips with African identity. Maybe they were racist in other ways, but they could appreciate somebody trying to find out who they are and where they came from.

Alex Haley provided a nice point of entry for the Latter-day Saint community to begin to bridge this divide that had existed between African Americans, Africans, and white Mormons for so many years. You see similar efforts in the 1980s, 1990s, of the church’s massive genealogical arm in reaching out to African Americans, saying, “Hey, listen, we know that because of the slave trade, many of you have struggled to find out who you are and where you came from. Well, we have the resources to find out who you are.” This is what ended up informing the church’s efforts to establish the Freedmen’s Bureau Project, in which they digitized and indexed the entirety of the Freedmen’s Bureau records. For those who are unfamiliar with this institution, this was the institution that was established for helping freed African American slaves to establish themselves as laborers and as functioning members of the community. And in the process, various genealogical data points were recorded in documents. You could find out a lot about the African American and enslaved community in the mid-19th century through these records. That’s another case in which church leaders tried to extend an olive branch to the African American community. But you have many other individuals, people who joined the church after 1978, like Catherine Stokes, where she ended up serving as a kind of goodwill ambassador for the church in Ghana when the church had been expelled from Ghana in 1989 because of the Jerry Rawlings’ administration’s opposition to many American religions. She has been, in many ways, an unorthodox ambassador and an unorthodox spokesperson, but her commitment to the church has never been in question. And as such, she’s been in a position to speak truth to white Latter-day Saints who might have been less inclined to hear it because of her fidelity to the church.

I think there is some merit to that. I mean we know from a conversation that George Q. Cannon had with some southern politicians that the fact that the Latter-day Saints were as opposed as they were to African Americans receiving the priesthood, it went over really well with some of these politicians. They liked it. They said, “You’re all so Aryan, you’re so Anglo-Saxon. We love how committed you are to preserving the Anglo-Saxon race. And we know that George Q. Cannon made this very public in the Deseret News. He said, “Utah is the most Anglo-Saxon out of all the territories and all of the states in the United States, and that’s something that we’re proud of, right. We’re not like those mongrels over in the south.” And missionaries would use this kind of as a proselytizing tool. “Come away from the miscegenation of Babylon. Come away from all the intermarriage. Come to the white haven that is Utah.” And statistically speaking, they were not wrong. Utah was heavily Anglo-Saxon. But the fact that they saw themselves as such, and they saw themselves as a haven for Anglo-Saxons who wanted to stay Anglo-Saxon, that tells us something about the state of racial discourse on the ground.

I point to the Latter-day Saints’ unanimity in an effort to highlight that you could argue that the Latter-day Saints had established for themselves an idol of whiteness in the same way that the children of Israel had established for themselves a golden calf. I think of Spencer W. Kimball’s comments in 1976 about the false Gods we worship, how you can worship patriotism or you can worship nationalism. Similarly, you can worship racial identity, and that is a false God, right. That is not the God that will save you, your common solidarity with your fellow Anglo-Saxon brothers and sisters, like the Latter-day Saints clearly believed in into the late-19th century.

You could see all this kind of discourse as a few different things. You could see it as indicative of change over time, but you could also see it from an ethical perspective as evidence of the Latter-day Saints erecting for themselves false deity, hoping for blessings from this idea that really had no salvation in it. There is no salvation in whiteness, there is no salvation in racial identity. According to LDS dogma, there is only salvation in the son of God, Jesus Christ.