Temple

The tenets of the LDS Church are too intricate and, over time, too variable to delve into detail here, but, like many other worldbuilding projects that attempt to fix an identity to a mythological “origin,” they have historically fallen into traps of biological and racial essentialism, extrapolating supposed biblical cues into a convoluted narrative that positioned northern Europeans as being the inherently “superior” descendents of the Israelites. ¹ They are not unique among religions in this tendency, joining a long list of various chosen peoples. We are interested in them here because they are a worldbuilding project that begins at the dawn of modernity, positions itself as an “American” religion, and which is actively engaged with both computer technology and history. Nineteenth century Mormons also believed that First Nations tribes were their distant cousins— descendents of Israelite tribes who had become dark-skinned due to sin. This resulted in some disappointment when Mormon-baptized indigenous peoples did not magically become light-skinned after being submersed (Akenson 2007, p. 27).

Spanish Conquistadores also thought that indigenous people must be Hebrews:

Also popular was the idea that the peoples of the New World were descendants of the lost tribes of Israelites. Or, perhaps, of Jewish exiles from Rome, evidence of which was the finely wrought golden jewelry found in the Yucatán. “We can almost positively affirm,” wrote Father Durán, that Mexicans “are Jews and Hebrews.” Almost positively. Fernando de Montesinos spent years in Peru producing five dense manuscript volumes reading New World history through the book of Revelation, arguing, among other things, that the Andes were the site of King Solomon’s fabled mines. The Spanish destruction of the Inka Empire, then, wasn’t so much a conquest as a rediscovery and reestablishment of Israel of old. Since, according to Christian esoterica, a new Jerusalem had to be raised and Jews converted to Christ before the Apocalypse could begin, the Conquest was a necessary step in the fulfillment of prophecy, and thus legal. ² (Grandin, n.d.)

From Some Family—

From 1976 (when the mission-to-the-dead was declared to be scripture) to the present day is a new temporal page in Mormon genealogical work. The present-day, well-informed “Saint” probably would be surprised and embarrassed to learn the nature of what was held to be divine truth only a generation or two ago. At an official level (whatever folk-beliefs may be), the LDS church today (1) no longer literalizes the descent of individual members from Ephraim. A new “Saint,” in receiving a tribal identity in the patriarchal blessing, now is merely being assigned a tribal identity by adoption, not the definition of his or her literal lineage;12 (2) the implicit “British Israelism” – the idea of the Anglo-Saxons and the Nordic Europeans being flush with the blood of the Lost Tribes of Israel – has been quietly dropped;13 (3) the bar to black priesthood was removed by divine revelation vouchsafed to the First Presidency in 1978; (4) the LDS church has tried to get along better with Jews (in, for example, stopping its baptizing of Holocaust victims), but there is a limit here to how far the “Saints” can go. After all, they still see themselves as being the truest (albeit not the only) form of the real Israel; (5) and, the idea that there is a connection between whiteness of skin and closeness to the Almighty, which had made for difficult relations with “brown” New World populations – the “Lamanites” – now is not much talked about. However, in the mission fields of Latin and South America, it still is useful to tell potential converts that they are descended from the ancient Israelites. And particularly in Polynesia, where the indigenous cultures maintain long and highly prized genealogies, the literal belief in brown peoples’ being part of an Israelite group can be tied into each indigenous culture’s origin-myth. (Akenson 2007, p. 223)

1. Akenson, Donald Harman. 2007. Some Family: The Mormons and How Humanity Keeps Track of Itself. Montréal, CA: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
2. Grandin, Greg. n.d. “America, América: A New History of the New World.”