“One in Faith, One in Color, One in Language”: The Deseret Alphabet and Early Latter-day Saint Theologies of Racial Restoration

ABSTRACT This article places the Deseret alphabet—the Latter-day Saints’ mid-nineteenth-century attempt at orthographic reform—in a broader field of inquiry that explores the role that religious scriptures played in the formation of racial and national identities in the Anglo-American world. Such analysis of the Deseret alphabet also sheds new light onto Anglo-American Christians’ deployment of scriptures to shape Natives and European immigrants into respectable American subjects and citizens, while also excluding African Americans from this people-shaping process. The Deseret alphabet's creators hoped orthographic supersession would not only speed up religious and linguistic restoration but also racial restoration. Latter-day Saints hoped that the new Mormon script, better than the old Roman script, and scriptures would restore (supposedly accursed) non-whites and not-fully whites to the raceless—as in “white”—original human form, uniting diverse Mormon converts into one Mormon people worthy to receive the imminently returning Christ.