Decolonizing Mormonism: Approaching a Postcolonial Zion

✍ Scribed by Gina Colvin; Joanna Brooks

• Publisher: University of Utah Press
• Year: 2018
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 332
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This volume seeks nothing less than to shift the focus of Mormon studies from its historic North American, Euro-American “center” to the critical questions being raised by Mormons living at the movement’s cultural and geographic margins.

As a social institution, Mormonism is shaped around cultural notions, systems, and ideas that have currency in the United States but make less sense beyond the land of its genesis. Even as an avowedly international religion some 183 years out from its inception, it makes few allowances for diverse international contexts, with Salt Lake City prescribing programs, policies, curricula, leadership, and edicts for the church’s international regions. While Mormonism’s greatest strength is its organizational coherence, there is also a cost paid, for those at the church’s peripheries.
 
Decolonizing Mormonism brings together the work of 15 scholars from around the globe who critically reflect on global Mormon experiences and American-Mormon cultural imperialism. Indigenous, minority, and Global South Mormons ask in unison: what is the relationship between Mormonism and imperialism and where must the Mormon movement go in order to achieve its long-cherished dream of equality for all in Zion? Their stories are both heartbreaking and heartening and provide a rich resource for thinking about the future of Mormon missiology and the possibilities inherent in the work of Mormon contextual theology.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Approaching a Postcolonial Zion
I. First, We Name Our Experience: Indigenous Mormonisms
1. Gina Colvin, A Maori Mormon Testimony
2. Thomas Murphy, Decolonization on the Salish Sea: A Tribal Journey back to Mormon Studies
3. Angelo Baca, Porter Rockwell and Samuel the Lamanite Fistfight in Heaven: A Mormon Navajo Filmmaker's Perspective
4. Elise Boxer, "This is the Place!": Disrupting Mormon Settler Colonialism
II. Living the Persistent Legacies of Colonization in LDS Contexts
5. Rolf Straubhaar, Unpacking White- Heritage Mormon Privilege: A Latter- day Saint Pursuit of Critical Consciousness
6. Alicia Harris, An Abundant God Knows the Middle Also
7. Mica McGriggs, What I Learned at Girls Camp: or Developing a Racial Identity Leads to Liberation
8. Ignacio Garcia, Empowering Latino Saints to Transcend Historical Racialism: A Bishop's Tale
III. Power, Difference, and Nation in the Globalizing LDS Church
9. Joanna Brooks, Mormonism as Colonialism, Mormonism as Anti- Colonialism, Mormonism as Minor Transnationalism: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives
10. Ingrid Sherlock, The LDS Church in Flanders: Their Way, Our Way, or Their Way in Our Own Way
11. Stacilee Ford, Sister Acts: Relief Society and Flexible Citizenship in Hong Kong
12. Melissa Wei- Tsing Inouye, A Tale of Three Primaries: The Gravity of Mormonism's Informal Institutions
Afterword, P. Jane Hafen
Notes
Bibliography
Contributors
Index