The racial conceptions and policies of Mormonism can best be understood in four overlapping historical contexts: (1) European rationales for colonial expansion, including such concepts as Anglo-Saxon triumphalism and British Israelism; (2) the related American doctrine of Manifest Destiny; (3) the sectional conflicts in the early United States over the status of African American slaves and of Native Americans, along with the religious rationales used to justify the national policies toward those peoples; and (4) the growing preoccupation in popular religion with millennialism and the coming End Times. All four of these contexts generated emotional issues in the American consciousness as the new Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (also “LDS” or “Mormon” Church) came into existence beginning in 1830 along the western frontier. [Source: Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Society; Mormons, Race and]
religion
race and Mormons
concepts