Review
Title: Decolonizing Mormonism: Approaching a Postcolonial Zion
Author: Gina Colvin and Joanna Brooks, eds.,
Publisher: University of Utah Press
Genre: Sociology/Anthropology
Year Published: 2018
Number of pages: 323
Binding: Trade paperback
ISBN10: n/a
ISBN13: 978-1-60781-608-9
Price: $24.95
Reviewed by Dennis Clark for the Association for Mormon Letters
On page 105 of Decolonizing Mormonism, Rolf Straubhaar writes “As a white, middle-class, married, straight Mormon man of Utah pioneer heritage, I arguably embody privilege at all possible intersections within Mormon religious culture.” Learning to understand this sentence, which applies in every particular to me, has taken a while. I have had to be re-educated. But as the book makes clear, it is crucial that I learn to understand the kind of privilege I embody, and Decolonizing Mormonism is a good tool for learning that.
In my graduate studies, I kind of laughed at Ivor Richards’ statement “A book is a machine to think with,” gently mocking it and its mill, Principles of literary criticis — which after all was published in 1924, and I was reading it in 1970. It seemed a relic of the industrial age of Edison, Ford and the Wright Brothers. But in this age of information technology, it seems prescient. This book, Decolonizing Mormonism, is a machine to think with. And Mormons needs to think about the issues it raises.
It is not comforting to learn at age seventy-three how I have been complicit in harming others in the Church I love. But I understand better now how that has happened, and what I can do to change my mindset. One of the most effective essays for my understanding comes from Elise Boxer, “‘This Is The Place!’: disrupting Mormon settler colonialism,” which uses the “This Is The Place!” Heritage Park in Salt Lake City as a lens to examine Mormon colonial actions.
For me, her most insightful comments are on her reactions to “handcart treks” for youth. “I did not participate in these reenactments because I knew they were part of the religious colonization process. I would not buy into this narrative because it conflicts with my Dakota identity. As a Dakota young woman, I made sense of this day on my own terms. I believed this event to be hypocritical at best” (95). From my own participation in one of these “treks,” I feel that they are hypocritical as well, but for different reasons: mine was a highly artificial, staged “event” in which the youth were encouraged to simulate the suffering of the Willie and Martin handcart companies, over the same ground, but in summer heat, and sleeping in tents. I was part of the tent-wrangling team. But the hypocrisy Boxer takes aim at is far more elemental: “How could we celebrate the Mormon move west to escape religious persecution yet remove Indigenous peoples from their traditional lands because they were not Mormon? … Indigenous peoples were not included in any historical narrative and I knew if we included Indigenous peoples, there would have to be an acknowledgment that Mormons settled on Indigenous lands” (95).
This is the case for all of the United States, not just Utah, and a problem at least as knotty as the problem of making reparations to African-Americans for the evil of slavery. But Mormons, in their pioneer treks, make it doubly difficult through what Boxer above calls “the religious colonization process” — by insisting that all Mormons assent to this confiscation of land. And in Utah the problem is made worse by the July 24th Pioneer Day celebrations, since the day is a state holiday. Talk about rubbing it in.
Alicia Harris, in her essay “An abundant God knows the middle also,” explains this religious colonization process from her own experience. “As a colonizing power, religion extends this reach into the mind and the spirit. In my own life, the colonizing power of Mormonism has required me to submit more wholly into the strictures of Mormon ‘righteousness’ than it allows me to ask questions about what it means to me to exist as both Native and Mormon. … I have to consistently pretend that people don’t mean to denigrate me when they talk negatively about ‘Lamanites’….” (128).
The whole question of “Lamanites” looms large in these essays, from Thomas Murphy’s “Decolonization on the Salish Sea” to Ignacio Garcia’s “Empowering Latino Saints to transcend historical racialism.” Garcia opens his essay with a tale that could fit into many of these essays: “A friend of mine tells a story about a friend of his who cannot wait for the resurrection. At that moment, his friend expects to shed his Peruvian features — short, dark, and Indigenous — and rise up a tall, white, golden-haired, blue-eyed Saint” (139). Others of his friend’s friends harbor similar thoughts, and Garcia suggests that this leads them to accept a “soft racialism” which promotes “a pecking order in which whites are the immediate recipients of the blessings of membership, while the rest of God’s children were to wait” — as Blacks had to (140). “By its nature,” he continues, “this theology … also asserts the premise that the advantages that white members have in this life will be maintained throughout eternity” (140). The result, as he has seen it, is that “an institutional comfort with or tolerance of economic and racial differences does influence how poor Mormons and Saints of color are integrated into the fold” (141).
Garcia’s development of this thesis is fascinating. In one example that stuck with me, Garcia explores his encounter as a bishop with scouting. “[I]t was not until I was called as a bishop in Tucson, Arizona, that I more fully understood the effects of this soft racialism among Latinos” (141-142). In replacing a bishop of nine years in his Spanish-speaking ward, Garcia, still a grad student, found himself comparing himself to a very charismatic, successful businessman. Garcia had grown up in a Mexican ward where, he says, “we were all quite poor” (143), but was now serving in an American ward with a very clear social stratification. After recounting the changes he made in the ward to help the most marginal members become involved, he describes a tangle with some of the middle-class families over his approach to scouting, who felt “frustrated” that their sons were not in scouting.
Garcia worked hard to support scouting, but says “The more I did, however, the more alienated the middle-class families became. The scoutmaster — a dear friend before I was called — became alienated from me even as my support for his troop grew. My ‘sin’ was that I did not force all the youth to be in scouting” (153) — and here I understood immediately, based on my own sons’ reactions to being scouts. The frustration of the parents arose from thinking that “without scouting their boys would not go on missions, marry in the temple, or serve in leadership positions” (154), a feeling not so subtly enhanced by Church leaders.
“I had a number of immigrant families who had converted or moved to our ward” he explains “with youth past the early scouting age. They did not like and did not want to be part of scouting. Some saw it as childish — given the behavior of most youthful scouts” [and again, having served in the scouting program, I can sympathize] “while others disliked the hyper-patriotism reflected in the uniform and ceremonies, which to some meant that they were to strip themselves of their Mexican citizenship, something they were not ready to do just yet” (153).
Again, I can sympathize. The scouting program was started by an English general and later baron, Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell, and has always had a paramilitary stench in my nostrils, and an elitist sheen in my eyes. Even when it was demoted to the “activity arm of the Aaronic Priesthood” I found it offensive, because we all had to wear the uniform in my stake and salute the flag in church. Bishop Garcia says: “My predecessor had struggled with what to do with them and one of his counselors had taken to chaining the gym doors to prevent them from playing ball or hanging around the church. After I became bishop, we stopped that practice — a huge mistake in some people’s eyes” (153).
He goes on: “We developed activities so those boys could participate in mutual even though they were not scouts. That was our second mistake. Then we developed a successful athletic and cultural arts program that added to their distrust because it took boys away from scouting” (153-4), including some boys from those families who hoped scouting would be a step up for their sons. After summarizing the effects of these programs in the lives of the boys, Garcia adds, not at all as an afterthought, “As much as I supported scouting …. I also understood that an obsession with scouting tended to marginalize young women in the ward because all the attention went to the young men” (154), an observation not unique to his experience of a phenomenon not limited to his ward. I don’t know what he would think of the current move toward a new youth program; but I like to imagine that some of his kind of thinking has worked its way up the ladder.
Typically, in a review of this kind of collection, a reviewer will attempt to characterize most of the articles. As I hope my own comments make clear, I had strong reactions to most of the articles. But rather than attempt that on my own, I’ll let P. Jane Hafen do that for you in her “Afterword,” and in the process summarize the concept of decolonization:
“Another aspect of decolonizing is testimony. In the essays in this volume, many of the authors give testimony of their experiences with Mormonism and its conflicts with their own culture or race. By bearing witness, these writers show how community can exist even when these differences are painful. Gina Colvin tells of her family history and the consequences of colonial practices, both good and bad, in conversion; she sees individual reconciliation through faith but acknowledges the hurtful marginalization of Indigenous peoples. Rolf Straubhaar boldly acknowledges white privilege in structural practices and the need for ‘critical consciousness’ in addressing practical inequalities. Thomas Murphy, Angelo Baca (Navajo) and Elise Boxer (Dakota) show the dissonance of Indigeneity and the literal textual readings of the Book of Mormon. Alicia Harris (Assiniboine) also feels that conflict but situates it within her own multiracial identity. Mica McGriggs addresses Mormon cultural racism in her own biracial experience. Melissa Wei-tsing Inouye, Ingrid Sherlock, and Stacilee Ford contextualize their international observations and experiences in contrast to the unspoken, yet determinate culture of the central Mormon practices of Utah. Ignacio Garcia outlines how restructuring can decolonize according to the needs of his congregation. Joanna Brooks reframes the historical narrative of race relations in a new historical pattern that reveals the complexities of Mormon history with minority populations” (272-273).
This was not an easy book to read, neither in its jargon nor in its implications for Mormon beliefs and practice. But one thing it brought home to me is the value, and the necessity, of practice. The problems faced in decolonizing Mormonism will not be solved by decree from Salt Lake City. They will be solved by trial and error, by attempts to make the church work in the image of Jesus of Nazareth — not the Christ, the Messiah, from whom, in Bruce R. McConkie’s phrase, “we shall obtain,” but the itinerant teacher, the healer, the homeless one who listened to the people, joked with them, ate and drank with them, and died for them.
I’m just beginning to apprehend that is what this book helped me do. I hope you will read it for yourself.