This presentation compares and contrasts Joseph Smith’s views and practices regarding slavery, race, and ethnicity with those of William Miller and Ellen G. White (founding leaders of Seventh Day Adventism) and Mary Baker Eddy (founder of the Christian Science movement). These issues figured prominently in all three religious movements, but while all four leaders were New England born, except for a brief embrace, Smith differed from the others by rejecting the region’s dominant attitudes on race issues, which were generally abolitionist and relatively progressive. What circumstances and forces led Smith to reject these “enlightened alternatives”?

Newell Bringhurst, Lavina Fielding Anderson