My first book, Race and the Making of the Mormon People, (University of North Carolina Press) was published in September 2017.

THE BOOK explores how the creation of the American modern nation-state—and of the American West in particular—was bound up in the creation of racial and religious divisions. I argued how nineteenth-century Americans sought to resolve what W. E. B. Du Bois described as America’s “color line.” Using the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as a case study, I argue that early Mormons challenged prevailing antebellum assumptions of race as fixed and immutable. Yet Mormon leaders were not egalitarians. They envisioned not racial pluralism but the “whitening” of non-whites through conversion. In this view, Whiteness—both symbolically and phenotypically—became an aspirational racial identity for non-whites in the American West, the Pacific Islands, and South America. Over time, however, Mormonism’s original “White universalism” gave way to a racialized Mormon ethnicity. The Mormon story, however, was not simply one of racial theologies imposed on others but also of persecution and marginalization. As they fled the Midwest under violent anti-Mormon campaigns, Latter-day Saints carried with them their visions of race and religion into the Great Basin. There, in competition and collaboration with Indigenous nations like the Utes under Wakara, Mormons helped create both the physical and cultural landscapes of the American West.

My Harvard dissertation, on which the book was based, won the Mormon History Association’s Best Dissertation Award in 2015. The book itself won the John Whitmer Historical Association’s Best Documentary History Award. Since the book’s publication, I have delivered invited lectures at Amherst, Stanford, Harvard, and the University of Virginia, among others. The book has been positively reviewed in major journals in religious studies and history, cited widely, and featured in The Atlantic and Harvard Divinity School Bulletin. I also discussed the book on KUER’s Radio West in June 2018 during the church’s commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the end of its racial restrictions against people of African descent. (Listen to the interview here).

RACE AND THE MAKING OF THE MORMON PEOPLE makes five contributions to the study of the intersections of race, religion, and the creation of the American West. First, it challenges the consensus that the Book of Mormon’s theology had little impact on Mormon worldviews, showing instead how its radical theological lens reshaped Mormon encounters with America’s racial landscape. Second, by analyzing Mormon prophecies and policies that theologized “White,” “Black,” and “Red” races, it pushes scholarship beyond the Black/White binary and the North/South framework of most race histories to show how race created the American West, too. Third, it shows how the absence of non-White voices in the Mormon archive was by design: since all Mormons were expected to be White—by birth or conversion—there was no place for non-White histories or historians in the collective memory. Fourth, it argues that theology and history are mutually constitutive: many have shown how Americans inscribed race into scripture; I show how scripture also shaped history itself, producing a religious movement caught between its own racialist and universalist impulses. Finally, the book recovers the histories of a few Black and Native Mormons, including figures like Jane Manning James, the Black servant of Mormonism’s founder Joseph Smith, and the Ute leader Wakara. By repositioning these figures within the Mormon archive, I show how Mormonism’s history was inseparable from both its own marginalization under anti-Mormon persecution and its role in colonizing and racializing the American West. In doing so, the book illuminates how, in American life more broadly, race became a theological category that united as well as divided.

Here is some excerpts from the first reviews of the book:

“Max Perry Mueller’s Race and the Making of the Mormon People . . . unearths the buried stories of black Mormons such as Jane Manning James, who was close to Mormon founders like the (Joseph) Smith family.” — Martin Marty, Sightings

“Max Perry Mueller, a historian at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, argues that Mormonism is a quintessentially American religion. . . . Yet, while the story of race and the LDS Church is similar to other American experiences of race, it’s also distinctive, leaving Mormons to grapple with the legacy of racism and white supremacy in their own way.” –The Atlantic

“Mueller’s excellent book tells us that race is a story we collectively write about ourselves.”
–Association for Mormon Letters

“Race and the Making of the Mormon People is a mature, meditative, and mighty engagement with a complex topic. Scholars of American religion and race, not to mention those engaged in the academic analysis of Mormonism, will be struggling with his conclusions for quite some time.” –Benjamin Park, Junto

“[Max Perry Mueller’s] new book Race and the Making of the Mormon People argues that the Book of Mormon both reinforced and challenged nineteenth-century Americans’ ideas about race–and that it set the stage for how Mormonism would develop in the decades to come.” –Jana Riess, Religion News Service