B.H. Roberts, Moral Geography, and the Making of a Modern Racist

A transdisciplinary Mormon history, this book is a work of American religious history, theology, science history, and cultural and historical geography. It deconstructs the race creationism, White supremacy, and Christian imperialism of leading interwar Mormon theologian B.H. Roberts. Roberts hoped to introduce the front-rank post-Darwinian, scientific, and philosophical postulates of his timepolygeny, preadamitism, electromagnetism, idealism, the multiverse, infinity, and interstellar travelto an increasingly fundamentalist Mormon establishment. Church authorities, however, including eventual prophet Joseph Fielding Smith Jr., proscribed and rejected Roberts modernist manuscript, The Truth, The, Way, The Life: An Elementary Treatise on Theology, circa 1930. Paradoxically, however, Roberts thinking appeared uncited in Smiths 1954 theology, Man, His Origin and Destiny. Here, Smith accelerated Roberts racism toward Afro-Americans, while reviling science, philosophy, and free thought. This book contextualizes all such fundamentalist Mormon thinking within todays struggle for social and environmental justice, and especially the Black Lives Matter movement.