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Joseph Smith characterized freedom of worship as a “privilege” that Latter-day Saints claimed for themselves and advocated for all others. He authored the Church’s eleventh article of faith, which reads, “We claim the privilege of worshipping Almighty God according to the dictates of our own conscience, and allow all [people] the same privilege, let them worship how, where, or what they may.”[1] This teaching, fundamental for Latter-day Saints, was grounded not only in Smith’s expansive views of theology, government, and inspiration but also in the Saints’ experiences of prejudice and persecution as a marginalized religious group. For many years Latter-day Saints’ marginalized status was such that members of America’s White Protestant mainstream society classed “Mormons” with foreigners, non-Christians, and people of color.[2]

This chapter argues that racism constrains religious freedom within society, using examples in the history of Utah’s majority religious group to show how the Latter-day Saints, through their attitudes and actions regarding race, have either allowed or failed to allow for all the privilege of religious freedom set forth in their eleventh article of faith. I focus on Latter-day Saints in Utah in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, though the basic premise [that a community’s track record on religious freedom is inseparable from its track record on race] applies to Latter-day Saint communities around the world, and to religious communities in general. I acknowledge my positionality as a Latter-day Saint historian currently employed by the Church’s own Church History Department, and a Chinese and Japanese American who has experienced racism within and without Latter-day Saint communities but not nearly to the same degree as Black people and Black Latter-day Saints in particular. I share this range of positive and negative examples not to either tout or tear down my faith and religious forebears but to build signposts for the roads leading to the places we want and don’t want to go.

This chapter addresses the following questions. First, how are race and religious freedom connected? Second, in the history of the Latter-day Saints in Utah, how have Latter-day Saint attitudes and actions on race protected religious freedom? Third, in the history of the Latter-day Saints in Utah, how have Latter-day Saint attitudes and actions on race restricted religious freedom? In particular, I will focus on the experience of Chinese Utahns, who have been featured relatively little in existing scholarship despite their long-standing historical presence within the state’s geographic, commercial, and human landscapes. With regard to the Chinese, I find that Latter-day Saints protected religious freedom by opposing mob violence and explicitly defending religious liberty for minority groups; they restricted religious freedom by criminalizing interracial marriage, restricting physical spaces, and eroding the dignity of Chinese religious symbols through popular racialized ridicule.

How Are Race and Religious Freedom Connected?

Some might reason, “Religious freedom does not depend on race issues. Religious freedom is a freedom among many others. It is not predicated on any other freedom but stands alongside all of them. In some societies, unfortunately, people might lack some freedoms on account of racial prejudice, such as freedom to purchase property or freedom to marry, but at least they have religious freedom. No one is stopping a Black person from being a Pentecostal or banning a Chinese person from burning incense at a shrine. Even people who are marginalized and underprivileged can have full religious freedom. Therefore, the presence of racial prejudice or discrimination in a society, while unfortunate, has nothing to do with the presence or absence of religious freedom.”

Such a line of reasoning works only if one holds that religious freedom is simply the right to believe, in the sense of the right of an individual to think certain thoughts or harbor certain religious ideas and assumptions. If religion is cerebral activity, completely in one’s head, then anyone with a head has religious freedom. If religion, however, to be religion, includes practice such as personal devotions, group worship, marriage choices, sacred spaces, public speech, institutional policies, parenting styles, dress codes, and any other expression involving a human body, a physical place, or other people, then religion clearly takes place in a social context. The social space available to a given individual determines whether their practice of religion is free or constrained. Members of marginalized groups that do not have access to the same social, cultural, or civic opportunities as members of the dominant group cannot possibly have access to the same religious opportunities either. In sum, religious freedom goes far beyond the abstract right to belief. It includes freedom to assemble with other believers, freedom to marry according to one’s religious requirements, freedom to express one’s religiously oriented views in a public space, freedom to purchase property and construct a house of worship, and many other concrete and complex actions governed by social privileges and opportunities. To the extent that a person’s physical appearance affects their privileges and opportunities in society, that is a society without full religious freedom.

In nineteenth-century America, race and social privilege were connected, including the privilege of religious worship. Racial and religious categories were frequently conflated in the case of Chinese Americans. People spoke of “Chinese” on the one hand and “Christians” on the other, or used the term “heathen” as both a religious and racial shorthand.[3] In the twenty-first century in some circles the term “Muslims” was shorthand for “people from Middle Eastern and North African countries,” although of course there are Muslims in many other parts of the world including Indonesia, the Philippines, and so on. These conflations, though problematic, make sense, because both the racial and religious categories were used to separate the privileged from the underprivileged, those deemed “normal” and those deemed “different.” So strong was the tie between race and social privilege that those who crossed race boundaries could lose social privileges. In 1922 the US Congress passed the Cable Act, which stipulated that White women who married Asian men would lose their US citizenship.[4]

The clearest example to illustrate the connection between race and the privilege of religious worship is the situation of enslaved people of African descent in mid-nineteenth-century Utah whose lack of physical autonomy meant they could not worship “how, where, or what they may.” Their time, movement, and even their physical bodies were not completely under their control. Gobo Fango, a young boy brought to Utah by the Talbots, a Latter-day Saint family from South Africa, could not worship in whichever shrine or chapel or sacred space he wanted. He did not even have freedom to choose to sleep in the house. His enslavers made him sleep in a shed, where the extreme winter cold caused frostbite, giving him a permanent limp. Even after 1862, when Congress outlawed slavery in US territories, the Talbots illegally sold him to labor for the Whitesides family. The Whitesides eventually sold him, again illegally, to herd sheep in Grantsville.[5] Outside of the thoughts in his head, Gobo Fango did not have religious freedom. He did not have freedom to choose to worship with any religious community, freedom to observe whichever rites he deemed necessary, freedom to participate in the sacrament of marriage with any willing partner he chose. He did not have freedom to contribute any religious speech in the public sphere. He lacked even the freedom to sleep inside the house.

The linkage between religion and race and the dynamics of majority-minority power can be seen in the thinking of Joseph Smith. In 1839, arguing for greater protection for religious minorities, Smith raised the examples of religionists associated at the time with foreign, non-White countries including “Mahomedans [Muslims]” and “Hottentots [Khoikhoi of southwestern Africa].” Even “if their religion was as false as hell,” he asked, “what right would men have to drive them from their homes, and their country, or to exterminate them so long as their religion did not interfere with the civil rights of men, according to the laws of our country? None at all.”[6] Through citing these examples, Smith acknowledged the position of non-White foreigners at the bottom of the social hierarchies of the day. Nevertheless, he argued for the extension of religious rights to all, including these non-White foreigners. Smith’s invocation of the fundamental right to home, country, and life, “even if their religion was as false as hell,” placed the rights of property and security as fundamental and inalienable. This statement suggested that in his eyes, the correctness or incorrectness of an individual’s religious belief should not affect that individual’s right to reside in a given place and to live in safety, free from physical violence. Smith spoke of Latter-day Saints, Middle Easterners, and Africans as belonging to the same category (the category of God’s children), acknowledging how their beliefs might be considered unusual or offensive to mainstream culture but defending them all the same.

Near the end of his life, when his thinking on majority-minority dynamics was most developed, Smith took concrete action by publicly opposing the enslavement of African Americans as he ran for president.[7] In February 1844 in a presidential pamphlet, Smith asked how the United States could claim that all were created equal while “two or three millions of people are held as slaves for life, because the spirit in them is covered with a darker skin than ours.”[8] This antislavery advocacy suggests a broad scope for Smith’s sweeping assertion in 1842 that all human beings “are, or ought to be, free,” possessing the same opportunities “to think and act, and say as they please, while they maintain a due respect to the rights and privileges of all other creatures, infringing upon none.”[9] So this is the notion of religious freedom as set out in the teachings of Joseph Smith: ideally a universal privilege but in reality threatened by formal and informal restrictions within societies that disregard the basic rights and dignity of religious and racial minorities.

Joseph Smith’s death in June 1844 ended the political reformist discourse associated with his campaign. He was replaced by Brigham Young, a leader who was very different from Smith in background, temperament, and racialist thinking, and who steered the Church in a very different direction. However, many of Joseph Smith’s teachings remained at the forefront of Church teachings, including his declaration on the “privilege” of free worship, canonized in Latter-day Saint scripture as the eleventh article of faith.

Overall, there is clear evidence of endemic racism against Indigenous peoples, Black people, and people of color in Utah society since the arrival of Latter-day Saint settlers in 1847. The most egregious example of racism in Utah, to which I have already alluded with the story of Gobo Fango, was the legislature’s official sanction of the enslavement of Blacks from 1852 to 1862, when the United States Congress abolished slavery in US territories. Even after emancipation, racism against Blacks was widespread. From 1852 to 1978 Church leaders denied Black Latter-day Saint women and men access to religious ordinances that they considered essential for salvation, justifying this policy with explanations that used explicitly racist language.[10]

During this time the Utah governmental bodies passed and upheld discriminatory laws. For the most part, Latter-day Saints dominated the state legislature and also local government because Latter-day Saints were the majority demographic within the state: in 1860, 88 percent of the population; in 1890, 66 percent; in 1900, 67 percent; in 1910, 61 percent; and in 1920, a low of 55 percent, after which the proportion of Latter-day Saints rose steadily by a few percentage points a year, reaching 71.5 percent in 1970 and staying in the mid-to-high 70s until a relatively recent (twenty-first century) decline.[11] Because of the simple-majority-based pathway to winning elections, a slight majority of Latter-day Saints in the general population can translate into a supermajority of Latter-day Saints in a body of elected representatives. For instance, even in 2021, when the general population was only 62 percent Latter-day Saint, the elected representatives in the legislature were 90 percent Latter-day Saint.[12] Therefore, while it would be wrong to use “Utah” as a synonym for “Mormons,” it would also be foolish to deny the tremendous influence of the Latter-day Saint community in making Utah’s laws, establishing Utah’s cultural norms, populating Utah’s neighborhoods, and so on.

In 1874 the Salt Lake City council declared Chinese laundries to be public nuisances and fined several Chinese laundry operators. Later that year, the council passed a statute aimed at the Chinese to keep them from butchering pigs within the city limits. Another ordinance prohibited fireworks at Chinese New Year (which were essentially a ritual practice in observance of the most important holiday in Chinese religion). Both Ogden and Salt Lake City received and considered petitions to create zoning that would restrict or exclude Chinese residents.[13] An Anti-Miscegenation Law passed by a non-Latter-day Saint legislature in 1898 and upheld by subsequent Latter-day Saint legislatures until 1963 banned marriage between Whites and Blacks and between Whites and Asians. In housing, informal segregationist policy was the rule as real estate agents, developers, and individual sellers made it difficult for people of color to buy property and live in predominantly White neighborhoods.[14] For instance, beginning around 1939, Sheldon Brewster, a local Latter-day Saint bishop and realtor, gathered a thousand signatures for a petition protesting the notion that Black citizens would move into his neighborhood and suggesting alternatively that neighborhoods elsewhere be designated for the housing of Black citizens. After this petition failed, in part due to protests organized by Black citizens, restrictive housing clauses were inserted into real estate contracts, such as the following[15]: “The buyer, his heirs, executors, administrators, successors, or assigns agree that no estate in possession of the said premises shall be sold, transferred, granted, or conveyed to any person not of the Caucasian race.”[16]

During World War II, in response to an influx of Japanese Americans behind barbed wire in the Topaz internment camp, the state legislature enacted an alien land law barring aliens ineligible for citizenship from renting or owning land.[17]

The most extreme examples of racism against Blacks and people of color involved mob violence. In 1883 police officers, all of whom were Latter-day Saints, took into custody a man known as Sam Joe Harvey who was accused of killing a police officer. He was then attacked by a mob of two thousand, “kicked, stamped, and beaten until his face was a mass of blood and bruises.”[18] The mob hung him in a stable yard at Salt Lake City Hall.[19] Crowds of men, women, and children gave a chorus of three cheers. Then some of them cut his corpse down and dragged it along State Street, “hooting and yelling like mad.”[20]

In 1925 a mob in Price took a Black man named Robert Marshall from his jail cell and hanged him in a long, sadistic process. Officials of the law did not materialize until it was all over. The crowd tortured Marshall until he finally died, to the cheers of the men, women, and children present. They all posed together for a photograph, wreathed in smiles, with Marshall’s body hanging from the tree in the background.[21]

These are among the most dismal scenes in Utah history, speaking to a widespread culture that dehumanized Black bodies. Thankfully, most expressions of racism within the community were less highly charged and ran the gamut from violent encounters to mocking depiction.[22] The history of the Chinese in particular—a population with stark religious differences compared to the Latter-day Saints’ version of Protestant Christianity—offers a helpful range of examples for understanding the relationship between race and religious freedom.

To explore the issue of race and religion as pertaining to the Chinese in Utah, I conducted a search in the online Utah newspaper archive for these terms: “Chinese” and “mob,” “Chink” and “joss house” (an old American term for a Chinese temple or house of worship). Because of the long history of Latter-day Saint majorities within Utah’s population, I take seriously the influence of Latter-day Saints in shaping Utah’s community norms and discourse, though of course one cannot assume that every word in an old newspaper represents the views of either church members or the church institution itself. The newspapers I cite represent a range of publishing organizations, some published for or by Latter-day Saints and others for or by non-Latter-day Saints. Taken all together, however, the Utah newspapers present certain views of the Chinese that are shaped by the state’s majority Latter-day Saint population, legislature, economy, and culture. My findings here are not exhaustive, but I will present some highlights.

Researching Utah newspapers, I identified two ways in which Latter-day Saint–dominated communities protected religious freedom by pushing back against anti-Chinese racism: first, through an official Church emphasis on the rule of law, and second, through a self-conscious awareness that the rights and freedoms afforded or denied one minority group would affect others. I found three ways in which Latter-day Saint-dominated communities inhibited religious freedom by encouraging racism against the Chinese: first, through anti-interracial marriage legislation; second, through restrictions on real estate and spatial ethnic distribution; third, through a low-level but persistent attack on public respect and dignity for Chinese people and their sacred symbols.

How Have Utah Latter-Day Saint Attitudes and Actions on Race Protected Religious Freedom?

The first way in which Latter-day Saints in Utah protected Chinese religious freedom by protecting the Chinese as a racial group is through discouraging anti-Chinese worker vigilantism and mob violence such as often prevailed within Wyoming, Colorado, and Nevada.[23] One study comparing anti-Chinese sentiment in Utah to that in other western states suggests “there is some evidence that Mormons were relatively more tolerant and respectful of the Chinese.”[24] Throughout the late nineteenth century, the Deseret News wrote far more favorable articles about the Chinese than was typical of articles about the Chinese in the West.[25] As Salt Lake City began to urbanize, Chinese farmers used vacant city lots to grow vegetables. This evoked the Latter-day Saints’ original ideal of an agricultural city. Local housewives appreciated the fresh, cheap produce Chinese farmers sold door-to-door.[26]

A tone of respect for the Chinese work ethic comes through in Latter-day Saint leader George Q. Cannon’s critique of an attempt in the Nevada legislature to defeat a bill that would officially protect Chinese from mob violence. Cannon commended “the hard working, economical sons of the ‘Flowery kingdom’” and argued, “The narrow-minded but relentless crusade that has been waged against the Chinese on the Pacific slope, and which seems to be extending into the Rocky Mountain Territories, is entirely un-American . . . if defeated, [the bill] will be a standing reproach to the people of Nevada.”[27] This editorial is unlikely to have affected the Nevada legislature’s deliberations, but it would have sent a strong message to Latter-day Saint workers in Utah that a more tolerant approach toward Chinese was desirable.

Latter-day Saint–owned publications generally showed strong support for the rule of law, which helped deter mob violence. Three years after Congress’s 1882 passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act that largely stopped Chinese immigration to the United States, the Knights of Labor sought to foment anti-Chinese sentiment in Ogden.[28] They started with a boycott. The Knights of Labor were an organization of workers, many of them unemployed or underpaid, that had found anti-Chinese rhetoric and anti-Chinese violence to be a highly effective recruiting tool in western states. Western newspapers often joined the Knights in publishing attacks on Chinese workers, building mainstream civic support for the Knights’ violent attacks. This did not happen in Ogden. The Latter-day Saint–run Ogden Daily Herald and Deseret News expressed sympathy for White workers’ frustrations and published negative editorials about Chinese moral character but ultimately rejected any sort of extralegal violence. For example, after a heated political rally on August 18 when a local judge, Judge A. Heed, said of the Chinese, “Why don’t we pass laws and drag them up; hang them up; do anything to get rid of them?” the Deseret News condemned the rhetoric as too extreme, though it did not contradict the premise that Chinese immigrants were undesirable. “None but legal and pacific measures are proper in divesting the country of their presence.”[29]

A more morally robust opposition to the Knights was mounted by General Nathan Kimball, who had served under Ulysses S. Grant in the Civil War and who stood before the crowd at the same rally in August 18 and pled for allegiance to the rights guaranteed to all by the Constitution. He said he stood before fifty thousand Southerners to defend the Constitution and would “see himself damned” before he stood with such men in driving the Chinese out. “Chinamen have as much a right to be here as Irishmen, under the law, or as Scandinavians, Englishmen, and natives of every other country,” he said. The Salt Lake Tribune noted that he was booed throughout his speech.[30] Ultimately it seems clear that the overall message in Utah newspapers was not one of racial respect and Constitutional equality but of the need to uphold the prerogatives of the legal establishment (which was, of course, controlled by Latter-day Saints). Local leaders disapproved of a nonlocal radical workers’ group trying to disrupt civic processes and foment mob violence in Utah society.[31]

This same emphasis on law and order is evident in the Church’s opposition to the Ku Klux Klan, primarily on the grounds that Klansmen created disorder and strife. The Deseret News published anti-Klan editorials and reports, including extracts from Latter-day Saint missionaries in the Southern States describing the Klan’s terrorist activities. These Southern missionaries themselves were periodically harassed and threatened with violence by the Klan, such as the time in Georgia in 1883 when Klansmen posted a sign near a Latter-day Saint church conference site warning the “Mormon Devils” to leave the area, or the time in 1887 when the Klan threatened to tar and feather a group of missionaries if they did not leave the area within twenty-four hours.[32] At church conferences, leaders expressed opposition more indirectly through law-and-order exhortations and disapproving notices of Klan activity in Utah and elsewhere in the Improvement Era. In the general conference of October 1922, President Heber J. Grant specifically named the Ku Klux Klan in condemning “secret organizations” that undertook to “administer punishment upon men and women, irrespective of the laws of the land.”[33] In sum, by regularly opposing the Klan and other forms of mob violence, Church leaders created more physical security for women and men of color in Utah.

This legalistic, rationalistic approach took precedence over raw racialist expressions in July 1900 as the anti-Christian Boxer Uprising raged in China, resulting in the deaths of many American and European missionaries and even more Chinese Christians. The Deseret Evening News reprinted excerpts from three major newspapers (the Kansas City Star, Los Angeles Express, and New York World), all advising tolerance for Chinese in the United States. Under the headline “Protecting the Mongolian,” two of the excerpts read, “The Chinese in this country are not responsible for the Boxer rebellion, and the atrocities at Pekin [sic],” and, “It is gratifying to state there have been no anti-Chinese outbreaks in any country and the indications are that there will be none.”[34] By emphasizing a clear distinction between the actions of the Chinese who were committing atrocities against Christians in China and the peaceable ways of Chinese immigrants in the United States, the Deseret Evening News supported Chinese rights to security, upheld local law and order, and struck a blow against racism.

A second way in which Latter-day Saints created space for Chinese religious freedom was through explicitly naming Chinese as people entitled to it, often alongside themselves. For example, at the height of the US government’s antipolygamy pressure campaign on the Church as an institution, involving the government’s seizure of Church property in 1888, the Ogden Daily Standard argued, “If the Government can do this with the Mormon Church, it will not take any greater stretch of authority to confiscate in the same way the property of the Catholic Church, the joss house [temple] of the Chinaman, or the magnificent edifices of the Methodists.”[35] In a similar vein, in 1898 the Salt Lake Herald-Republican reprinted a pro–Latter-day Saint article from the Washington Post comparing the Church to other “non-Christian” religions:

What has ‘United States state’ to do with those elders, their religion, or their preaching? And when and where did the United States government attempt the ‘regulation of Mormonism’? . . . Religious liberty means a great deal in this country. It means the right to believe in and practice any religion or no religion, just as one pleases. The law gives equal protection to Christian church and heathen temple. No matter how absurd a belief may be, in the general estimate, or how ridiculous the rites may seem to the average American, the law respects them. The erection of mosque or Joss house on the corner of every street in Washington, Baltimore, Boston, or any other or every other city in the United States would not offend against any law.[36]

These explicitly pro-religious-freedom discourses often included mentions of the Chinese, whose religious practices Latter-day Saints saw as both dramatically different and also familiar because of the regular presence of Chinese in local society. Every year just before Chinese New Year, numerous Utah papers reported extensively on Chinese religion and customs. Around the turn of the twentieth century it was a common practice for members of the community to enter Chinatown as tourists during the New Year holiday. “Hundreds of prominent Salt Lake citizens have already taken a peep into Chinatown during the festivities. Hundreds more will throng the place tonight and tomorrow,” reported the Deseret Evening News in February 1902. “To obtain access to the interior of the Chinese dwellings and ‘joss’ house, parties should be supplied with a guide. These can easily be secured either from the police department or from residents of the district. Such a visit will give only a faint idea of Chinese life and customs. But it will probably be the most adequate one that can be obtained this side of San Francisco or China itself.”[37]

During these festive days, Chinese residents in Plum Alley, the central artery of Salt Lake’s Chinatown, served tea and sweets to visitors. In 1911 the members of the legislature visited Chinatown in a body. From early evening until midnight, parties guided by policemen “might be seen filing along through the mud from one store to another, dodging firecrackers and stumbling over the rough stone walks in their eagerness not to miss any of the sights.” To Utahns, ensconced in a majority Latter-day Saint society that had driven Native Americans and their religious practices to distant reservations, the Chinese were among the most different, exotic, and therefore interesting cultural groups in the community. They were a handy example of religious diversity and therefore ready to mind in arguments about how religious freedoms should apply to all.

Finally, papers in Utah often reprinted excerpts from other newspapers that discussed Latter-day Saints as an exotic, peculiar religious group on par with other exotic and charismatic religious groups including the Chinese. For instance, an August 1907 article called “All Religions in London” that described the world’s many religious sects in a colorful, exoticized tone was reprinted in four different rural papers:

In London the Chinaman burns his incense stick in more than one joss-house in the east end, the Mahometan has his mosque, the Malayan his temple, near St. George’s street easy; the Parsees worship the sun in Bloomsbury, the Mormons have a mission in Islington, and in many parts of the metropolis the Buddhists and Ancestor Worshipers perform their strange rites. Of Christian sects in London there are at least 300, including the Cokelers, the disciples of William Sirgood, the Walworth shoemaker; the Peculiar People, who prefer prayer to physicians; the Sandemanians, the followers of Joanna Southcott, the prophetic serving maid; the Shakers and the Seventh Day Baptists.[38]

On the one hand, it was a mark of prestige that the article had noted the presence of the Latter-day Saints along with other “world religions.” On the other hand, the article’s listing many esoteric religious groups may have reminded readers that Latter-day Saints were still seen as a group on the margins. Such awareness of marginality may have made it easier for Latter-day Saints to empathize with the Chinese, or to see the protection of Chinese rights as bellwethers for their own situation.

The Latter-day Saints in Utah protected Chinese religious freedom by opposing extralegal violence and naming their minority religious practices as worthy of legal protection. In the remainder of this paper, I will discuss three ways in which Latter-day Saints in Utah eroded Chinese religious freedom: bans on interracial marriage, restrictions on spatial mobility, and erosion of sacred spaces and symbols through public discourse.

How Have Utah Latter-day Saint Attitudes and Actions on Race Restricted Religious Freedom?

Legal statutes against interracial marriage, enacted by the Utah territorial legislature in 1888 and maintained by subsequent Utah state legislatures until 1963, restricted Chinese religious freedom by denying free access to a major Chinese religious duty—namely, to marry and produce offspring to carry on the family line and continue ancestral rites. Ancestral worship is a central aspect of both popular religion and also Confucian moral teaching. To fail to provide offspring to one’s parents was considered a deep dereliction of filial duties. For the Chinese in Utah, however, there were significant hurdles to marrying a member of one’s own racial and cultural group. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was generally enacted to limit Chinese immigration, but it banned “prostitutes” and was enforced in such a way that labeled almost every Chinese woman coming to the United States as a prostitute.[39] Thus, the number of Chinese women in Utah was vanishingly small. To marry a Chinese bride, a Chinese man in Utah had to get legal permission to return to China and come back. In the days of legal exclusion, denial of citizenship, and anti-Chinese racism, even this legal permission was not ironclad. A man who had long resided in Utah might go back to China to find a wife but be denied reentry subject to the whims of an immigration official.

The pool of Chinese women to marry was therefore very small, and the pool of non-White women was not much bigger. By maintaining antimiscegenation statues between 1888 and 1963, the leaders of this Latter-day Saint–dominated community significantly restricted the access of Chinese and other non-White residents to the religious rite of marriage. Even when a Chinese man’s marriage partner was actually non-White due to ancestry, the appearance of being White could create obstacles. According to historian Peggy Pascoe, it was not uncommon in the West for people to cross race boundaries to fulfil their ideals of gender relations in marriage.[40] This is what happened in 1898 when Quong Wah, proprietor of a local laundry business, and his fiancee Dora Harris sought a county marriage license in Salt Lake. The deputy county clerk rejected their request, on the grounds that Dora Harris appeared White. Harris disputed this judgment, saying that her mother was a “French Creole” and her father was “half Irish and half negro.” But the clerk argued that “the Caucasian blood predominated” in Harris, and denied the license.[41] The Utahns had not been complicit in enacting the racist Chinese Exclusion Act. But by maintaining anti-interracial marriage statutes, they ensured that Chinese and Blacks were officially excluded from the religious rite of marriage insofar as it involved the vast majority of potential marriage partners in the state.

A second way in which Utah Latter-day Saints restricted Chinese American access to religious freedom was in the form of legal and social restrictions on space in the community. Chinese Americans in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Utah could not worship wherever they wanted. They were largely confined by social pressures to the cramped, squallid, poorly maintained streets and living quarters of Salt Lake City’s Chinatown. When they tried to venture outside this cordon, they were often harassed or attacked. Historian Michael Lansing notes that within Salt Lake City, random violence against Chinese was much more likely outside Chinatown than within it. “In January 1891, ‘a Chinaman presented himself at police headquarters. . . . badly beaten and bruised by a crowd of boys’ while walking through town. In October 1893 a young man named Charles Arnup stoned Wong Kong Kim to death at the corner of Third South and Ninth East.[42]

Beyond violence, Lansing notes, harassment was often leveled at Chinese residents outside of Chinatown in the form of legal actions or fines for petty offenses to which White members of the population were rarely subjected. In September 1898, Chung Chung was arrested and brought in to police court because he had been “hanging around a residence on the West Side.”[43] Chung Chung explained that he had been looking for work at the garden of a fellow Chinese and had gotten lost. In the same month, a policeman fined Ching Ying two dollars for violating the bicycle ordinance. This ordinance required all bicycles in use in the city limits to have a bell and a light, and was rarely enforced. Also in September 1898, officers arrested Charles Chong and Wong Chin for shooting snipe out of season and fined them five dollars each. The city arrest register does not record any similar arrest in the 1890s. White citizens, including police, saw the Chinese outside of Plum Alley as immediately suspect.[44]

In addition to these restrictions on spatial mobility, which would constrain Chinese Utahns’ ability to gather for worship or access sacred spaces, in the World War II era, the Latter-day Saint–dominated community in Utah popularized restrictive real estate covenants that made it impossible for non-White people to purchase property. Chinese were thus barred from purchasing property to erect places of worship. They could not build temples. They could not gather as a community in a sacred space consecrated for that purpose.

The third way in which Latter-day Saints in Utah constrained the religious opportunities of Chinese was through low-grade denigrations of the Chinese religion in popular media. This is certainly the least egregious of all the expressions of racism discussed in this paper, but it is significant because it shows the extent to which racist ideas and assumptions were present throughout Utah popular culture. If the Latter-day Saints “claim the privilege of worshiping Almighty God according to the dictates of [their] own conscience and allow all [others] the same privilege, let them worship how, where, or what they may,” this suggests the act of worshipping or reverence shpild be accorded basic respect, regardless of the manner or object of worship. The language of this article of faith suggests that the basis for this respect is the dignity of human conscience, which lends a dignity to the manner or objects of sincere worship. To the extent that racist tropes, slang, stories, and ideas ridiculed or downgraded Chinese individuals, Chinese culture, and Chinese religious practices within society, they also degraded the public dignity of these individuals and profaned sacred religious symbols such as hair (a sacred gift from one’s parents), images of deities, and places of worship.

Freedom of religion includes not only the social opportunity for people to gather to worship but also the charismatic opportunity, at the micro level of actual religious experience, for people to create reverence, special separation from the world, and connection with the divine. Countless histories have shown how members of reviled and persecuted religions can indeed gather in closets, in hovels, in dugouts, and places that have been burned and destroyed, to worship, and that these humble circumstances can sometimes intensify people’s religious experience. Religious freedom does not include the right to be popular. But at the same time the privilege of religious freedom as defined above by Joseph Smith implies parity in terms of the dignity given to conscience and devotion. To denigrate or mock another’s exercise of conscience or devotion to the divine is another way of invading that person’s sacred space. Devout believers will hold fast despite these invasions, but the invasions still constitute a public attack on the right to define and preserve that which is sacred. For instance, Latter-day Saints are offended when people publish recordings of the temple ceremony online or when vandals graffiti on the outside of Latter-day Saint temples. These disrespectful acts desecrate sacred spaces. In the public sphere, disrespectful speech is also an act of desecration.

This desecratory speech can be found in negative descriptions of Chinese religious and cultural celebrations and also funeral rites. One account of Chinese New Year in 1906 in the Salt Lake Herald-Republican sniffed, “The thicker the fumes and the more foul smelling they become is the proof that is given the faithful on earth that the omens are good and another happy year is in store for the faithful slant-eyed worshippers of Confucius.”[45] A July 1921 Ogden Standard-Examiner headline read, “Chinese Still Believers of Fairy Tales—‘Flowery Kingdom’ Is Peter Pan Nation; Never Grows Up—Many Myths Told—Oriental Has Old-Fashioned Darkey Beat for Superstition.” With complete obliviousness to the supernatural nature of stories in Christian scripture, the article, reprinted from a missionary dispatch in another paper, criticized Chinese beliefs in supernatural occurrences, calling them “uneducated children.”[46]

Desecratory speech is expressed where people used terms for Chinese religion such as “joss house,” “idol,” and “altar” in ways that carried a negative or derogatory meaning. For instance, the Logan Journal, praising a political orator, said that Ms. Laura de Force Gordon “wastes no time in preliminaries but plunges at once into her subject and smashes the idols of protection and centralization in the joss house of Republicanism.”[47] By equating the Republicans—in this case, Ms. Gordon’s political enemies—with Chinese religionists, this language was clearly meant to discredit them. A similar tactic, this time focused on the Democrats, was at work in the Ogden Daily Standard in September 1898: “And thus the Democrats of the State, with but few exceptions, sneer at Silver Republicans and refuse to give them support unless they renounce all forms of Republicanism and worship with them at their joss house, where, until quite recently, they gave homage to their Grover and burned punk sticks that smelt of free trade and the single gold standard.”[48]

Here the images of a Chinese temple (“joss house”) and incense (“punk sticks”) are used as a smear technique, a way to desecrate the image of the Democrats and their president, Grover Cleveland. Of course, religious images have long worked their way into popular discourse to describe parallel situations. But it is striking how in the Utah newspapers, describing a White person in a way that connected them to Chinese religion amounted to an ad hominem attack, a way to downgrade that person in the public eye.

Desecratory speech can also be found in the way in which Chinese culture became a “meme” or a cultural trope signalling something funny or laughable. A shop advertisement in 1910 purported to relay speech in a Chinese accent, depicting an attempted robbery, in order to catch viewers’ attention and advertise hats:

Yee Sun Hop, Sin Wah and On Jung, also the ‘smoke’ Rastus Miller, went ‘round and ‘round in a ‘chink’ wash factory on West Temple, the other evening. Rastus, allee sammee, heap much holdem uppee ‘chink.’ ‘Chink’ allee sammee plenty mad-likee hellee. Bime-by, he catchem idea—glab quick, big chop-chop and cleave Rastus on the noddle. But, is a rap on the head necessary to remind you of the classy style and splended selection in mannish head coverings afforded you here in selecting serviceable Christmas presents?

By using exaggerated accents and phrases commonly used to mock and caricature Chinese, the shop hoped to attract viewership for their advertisement.

A similar tactic was employed by a tailor shop in the Ogden Evening Standard in July 1912. The advertisement depicted a White tailor cutting off the queue of a Chinese person (one’s hair was considered a sacred gift from one’s parents, not to mention a physical body part that should be subject to one’s own autonomy and not others’).

Quality and Quantity

Quality in fabric and tailoring has always been the mainstay of our dynasty. Quantity is another god in whose joss house we worship generous stocks, offering profit as a sacrifice upon its altar.[49]

This disrespectful portrayal of a White man violating the bodily autonomy of a Chinese man, while also using terminology describing Chinese religious practice (“joss house,” “worship,” “sacrifice upon its altar”) sought to catch the eye with a “humorous” image, and stick in the memory through the mnemonic of “quality” and “quantity” which evoked the “queue,” or Chinese hairstyle. In short, racism was a powerful advertising resource. Such a public and crass deployment of racial denigration also detracted from respect for Chinese in the community, thereby detracting from the public dignity and prestige of their religious practice.

At the University of Utah’s junior prom in 1908, the gymnasium was decorated with different booths representing different organizations of the school. The medical association created a section of an anatomy room. But the Alpha Pi organization set up “a traditional Chinese joss house. The walls were covered with all sorts of Chinese script. In one corner of the booth, which was outside the joss house, Chinese delicacies were served.”[50] This is a pretty standard example of cultural appropriation, with a sacred space being used to lend exotic flair for the two hundred couples present at the dance. (Imagine how Latter-day Saints would react at a fashionable gala that served hors de ouevres in a “Mormon temple” booth on a mock “temple altar”.)

A similar example of both the attraction of “exotic” Chinese culture and the freedom local Utahns felt appropriating sacred symbols for commercial purposes is the Myton Joss House. An advertisement in August 1918 proclaimed “May We See You at the Myton Joss House: The Place for Recreation and Refreshments; Fruits, candy, cigars, soda water, ice cream, etc. In fact everything to EAT AND DRINK.” The corresponding image showed a Chinese-looking deity.

At this point one might grant that this was certainly a stroke of advertising genius, an unusual image that would capture a reader’s attention and a memorable name that would be easily recalled. But the total disregard of the advertisers for the sacred dignity of Chinese religious symbols and their sense of entitlement as members of the dominant majority culture to use the culture of the minority religious group shows the lack of “allowing all the same privilege” in terms of the dignity of sacred conscience and worship.

These examples of descratory public speech and image-making are certainly not as horrifying as the examples of lynching and random murder I shared earlier. But taken as a whole, they are just as weighty because such racist ideas permeated popular culture and laid the groundwork for White supremacist attitudes and malicious or violent actions. Not just in the attitudes and actions of a few thugs inclined to violent behavior, but in the lives of people making political arguments, buying clothes, or drinking soda water, these depictions of Chinese sacred symbols in popular culture gave racism a potential eternal life—always circulating, always renewing, always reappearing in a way that reinforced White superiority and normativity and Chinese inferiority and alterity.

At the end of this discussion, I think it is obvious that these various expressions of racism, which limited opportunities for religious freedom, applied not only to the Chinese who have been my subject today but to other minority groups, including Black people, Indigenous peoples, and people of color who have long called Utah home. Pushed off their rich lands, Native Americans were no longer able to sustain their traditional way of life including their religious practices. Distrusted and despised because of their non-Protestant religion, language, and skin color, Italians and Greeks in Helper had to band together against Ku Klux Klan activities intended to circumscribe their opportunities to worship “how, where, and what they may.”[51]

Finally, turning from my academic argument and thinking about this issue from my personal perspective as a practicing Latter-day Saint, it seems evident to me that a society that truly values and advances religious freedom is a society that truly values and advances the work of anti-racism. Conversely, to paraphrase 1 John 4:20, if anyone says, “I love religious freedom,” but hates “working to end racism,” they are living in a state of hypocrisy, for whoever does not care to protect universal human dignity cannot truly value the sacred privilege of all people to worship “how, where, or what they may.” Full and equitable access to all opportunities enjoyed within a society is the prerequisite for full freedom of religious opportunities such as gathering for worship, building sacred spaces, communing with the divine, transmitting religious beliefs to the next generation, performing essential religious ordinances, and so on.

It is myopic to discuss religious freedom as if it exists all by itself, independent of a broader social context. Instead we must ask questions such as religious freedom for what group of people? What is this group’s relationship to other groups within society, including racial groups? How does rhetoric about religious freedom function within existing dynamics of power in a particular social context, including dynamics shaped by race (and also by other factors such as gender, class, sexual orientation)? Unless we ask these kinds of substantive questions regarding the larger context for religious freedom and are willing to interrogate our own record in securing for others the same freedoms we wish for ourselves, I fear our discussions of this topic will be hopelessly self-serving and thereby useless to others who seek the privilege of worshipping Almighty God according to their conscience but have not yet been able to claim it.

Notes

[1] Joseph Smith, “Church History,” Times and Seasons, March 1, 1842, 3:710, ; Joseph Smith et al., “A Proclamation to the Saints Scattered Abroad,” Times and Seasons, 15 January 1841, 2:277, . Smith’s notion of “privilege” is expansive, but Webster’s 1828 dictionary defines “privilege” with some narrower possibilities, including as a “peculiar benefit or advantage, right or immunity, not common to others of the human race. Thus, . . . we have ecclesiastical and religious privileges secured to us by our constitution of government, . . . advantage; favor; benefit.” From Webster’s 1828 dictionary online, s.v. “privilege.” https://archive.org/details/americandictiona02websrich/page/n359/mode/2up.

[2] Paul Reeve, Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). Tisa Wenger’s recent book, Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal (University of North Carolina Press, 2020), explores the intersections between discourses of religious freedom, race, and empire in the history of the United States. Wenger argues that American ideas about religious freedom were continually reinvented through a vibrant national discourse that often worked to privilege the dominant white Christian population, while at the same time, minority groups at home and colonized people abroad invoked and reinterpreted this ideal of religious freedom to defend themselves and their way of life. For another view of competing perspectives on religious freedom, see Xavier Foccroulle Ménard and Anna Su, “Liberalism, Catholic Integralism, and the Question of Religious Freedom,” Brigham Young University Law Review 47, no. 4 (Summer 2022): 1171–1218, which uses the perspective of integralism (the idea of living one’s comprehensive beliefs in the public realm as opposed to the classical liberal notion of keeping religious beliefs as private preferences).

[3] Kathryn Gin Lum, Heathen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022).

[4] Anne Blankenship, “Asian American Religions from Chinese Exclusion to 1965,” in Oxford Handbook of Religion and Race in American Society, ed. Kathryn Gin Lum and Paul Harvey (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 448.

[5] Century of Black Mormons, s.v. “Gobo Fango,” https://exhibits.lib.utah.edu/s/century-of-black-mormons/page/welcome.

[6] Joseph Smith, Liberty, MO, to Isaac Galland, [Commerce, IL], March 22, 1839, in Times and Seasons, February 1840, 1:53, 55–56, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/letter-to-isaac-galland-22-march-1839/3.

[7] Spencer W. McBride, Joseph Smith for President: The Prophet, the Assassins, and the Fight for American Religious Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021).

[8] Joseph Smith, General Smith’s Views on the Power and Policy of Government of the United States (Nauvoo, IL: John Taylor, 1844). The image of this pamphlet is accessible online at https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/history/topics/joseph-smiths-1844-campaign-for-united-states-president.

[9] Joseph Smith, Nauvoo, IL, to James Arlington Bennet, Arlington House, Flatbush, NY, September 8, 1842, JS Collection, Church History Library, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/letter-to-james-arlington-bennet-8-september-1842/1.

[10] There are many studies relating to the topic of the racial exclusion for priesthood and temple access within The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, including, to name just a few, Lester E. Bush, “Mormonism’s Negro Doctrine: An Historical Overview,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 8, no. 1: 11–68; Reeve, Religion of.a Different Color; Joanna Brooks, Mormonism and White Supremacy: American Religion and the Problem of Racial Innocence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020); and the Church’s own historical essay, “Race on the Priesthood,” https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics-essays/race-and-the-priesthood.

[11] Dean May, “A Demographic Portrait of the Mormons, 1830–1980,” in The New Mormon History: Revisionist Essays on the Past, ed. D. Michael Quinn (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1992), 121–35.

[12] Matt Canham, “Salt Lake County Is Now Minority Mormon, and the Impacts Are Far Reaching,” Salt Lake Tribune, December 9, 2018, Lee Davidson, “Latter-day Saints Are Overrepresented in Utah’s Legislature, Holding Nine of Every Ten Seats,” Salt Lake Tribune, January 14, 2021.

[13] Daniel Liestman, “Utah’s Chinatowns: The Development and Decline of Extinct Ethnic Enclaves,” Utah Historical Quarterly, 64, no. 1 (1996), https://issuu.com/utah10/docs/uhq_volume64_1996_number1/s/10356153.

[14] Tonya S. Reiter, “Not in My Neighborhood: The 1939 Controversy over Segregated Housing in Salt Lake City,” Utah Historical Quarterly 90, no. 1 (2022), https://issuu.com/utah10/docs/utah_historical_quarterly_volume90_2022_number1/s/15082737.

[15] Reiter, “Not in My Neighborhood,” 16.

[16] Ronald G. Coleman, “Blacks in Utah History: An Unknown Legacy,” in The Peoples of Utah, ed. Helen Papanikolas (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society, 1976), 138.

[17] Masao Suzuki, “Important or Impotent? Taking Another Look at the 1920 California Alien Land Law,” Journal of Economy History 64, 1 (March 2004): 125–43.

[18] “Bloody and Brutal: Chief of Police Burt Shot and Killed on Main Street by a Vagabond Negro, Swift Vengeance Meted Out to the Assassin Who Is Captured and Lynched by an Infuriated Crowd of Citizens,” Salt Lake Daily Herald, August 26, 1883, 9, https://newspapers.lib.utah.edu/ark:/87278/s6ht3vqb.

[19] Larry R. Gerlach, “Vengeance vs. the Law: The Lynching of Sam Joe Harvey in Salt Lake City,” unpublished manuscript, 24. Gerlach notes that a man claiming to be the murdered man’s half brother identified him as “Joseph Samuels,” but in popular discussions of the incident the murdered man was known as “Samuel Joe Harvey.”

[20] Gerlach, “Vengeance vs. the Law,” unpublished manuscript, 15.

[21] Coleman, “Blacks in Utah History,” 137.

[22] The digital Utah newspaper resource, Utah Digital Newspapers, has numerous examples of this. For instance, see the Salt Lake Tribune, February 17, 1878, speaking pejoratively of Christian notions that resembled “some Chinese joss house”; a Salt Lake Herald-Republican article of October 29, 1896, took a dig at a local politician by calling him “a Brown Man—Not in Complexion, Mind You, But Politically”; the Salt Lake Tribune on May 31, 1903, reprinted a story from the New York Herald featuring a Chinese cook as a comic villain, caricatured as imbecilic and scheming.

[23] Violence against Chinese in the West was usually reported on with a combination of lurid interest and notes of disapproval. See, for instance, a report on a physical attack on a Chinese man in an Evanston “joss house” in which “a young hoodlum . . . picked up a lump of coal weighting two or three pounds, and threw it at the Chinaman, striking him just above the left temple, nearly splitting his head open and cutting one of the main arteries,” Ogden Semi-Weekly Junction, November 11, 1876; “California Ruffians,” Deseret Evening News, December 29, 1900; “Vandals Invade the Joss House,” Salt Lake Telegram, January 29, 1903, and many, many others.

[24] Andrew Taylor Kirk, “Radical Labor, Racism, and the Preservation of Hegemony in Ogden, Territorial Utah, 1885–1886,” American Journalism 24, no. 4 (2007): 149–73.

[25] Kirk, “Radical Labor,” 158.

[26] Kirk, “Radical Labor,” 159, 163.

[27] Deseret Evening News, February 12, 1869, 12.

[28] Blankenship, “Asian American Religions,” 441.

[29] Kirk, “Radical Labor,” 162.

[30] Kirk, “Radical Labor,” 161; “Ogden Department: Anti-Chinese Meeting,” Salt Lake Tribune, August 19, 1885.

[31] Kirk, “Radical Labor,” 159.

[32] Larry R. Gerlach, Blazing Crosses in Zion: the Ku Klux Klan in Utah (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1982), 11.

[33] Gerlach, Blazing Crosses in Zion, 36–37.

[34] “Protecting the Mongolian,” Deseret Evening News, July 27, 1900.

[35] Ogden Daily Standard, March 11, 1888.

[36] Salt Lake Herald-Republican, September 14, 1898.

[37] “New Year Festivities in Salt Lake’s Chinatown,” Deseret Evening News, February 8, 1902.

[38] “All Religions in London,” reprinted in Emery County Progress, Coalville Times, Eureka Reporter, Garland Globe, August 23 and 24, 1907.

[39] Sucheng Chan, ed., Entry Denial: Exclusion and the Chinese Community in America, 1882–1943 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), 95.

[40] Patrick Q. Mason, “The Prohibition of Interracial Marriage in Utah, 1888–1963,” Utah Historical Quarterly 72, no. 2 (2008): 108; Peggy Pascoe, “Race, Gender, and Intercultural Relations: The Case of Interracial Marriage,” in Writing the Range: Race, Class, and Culture in the Women’s West, ed. Elizabeth Jameson and Susan Armitage (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 72.

[41] Mason, “The Prohibition of Interracial Marriage in Utah, 1888–1963,” 108–31, citing Salt Lake Tribune, September 16, 1898.

[42] Michael Lansing, “Race, Space, and Chinese Life in Late-Nineteenth-Century Salt Lake City,” Utah Historical Quarterly 72, no. 3 (2004): 227.

[43] Lansing, “Race, Space, and Chinese Life,” 227.

[44] Lansing, “Race, Space, and Chinese Life,” 227.

[45] “Local Chinese Observe Feast,” Salt Lake Herald-Republican, October 27, 1906.

[46] Ogden Standard-Examiner, July 17, 1921, 15.

[47] Logan Journal, October 19, 1892.

[48] Ogden Daily Standard, September 26, 1898.

[49] Ogden Evening Standard, July 24, 1912.

[50] “Utah Schools and School Work,” Inter-Mountain Republican, February 16, 1908.

[51] Helen Zeese Papanikolas, Toil and Rage in a New Land: The Greek Immigrants in Utah, special issue of the Utah Historical Quarterly 38, no. 2 (Spring 1970): 180–81.