While avoiding an outright apology about its past, the LDS leadership in Salt Lake is attempting to address issues within Mormon culture, as well as perceptions of the faith in American political culture, and beyond. Reading between the lines, this new statement on race reflects what the LDS Church has learned from heightened scrutiny in recent years-during the so-called “Mormon Moment”-when a presidential campaign and a Broadway musical had America and the world investigating the faith.
Church leaders today unequivocally condemn all racism, past and present, in any form.
2013 LDS SCRIPTURES SKIN
Today, the Church disavows the theories advanced in the past that black skin is a sign of divine disfavor or curse, or that it reflects actions in premortal life that mixed-race marriages are a sin or that blacks are or people of any other race or ethnicity are inferior in any way to anyone else. The following is the most direct and the most explicit passage: Now church officials acknowledge that their predecessors were wrong. In Mormon soteriology, this meant that blacks were also barred from the highest levels of heaven. The new statement recognizes that its own leaders-leaders whom Mormons consider prophets of God capable of receiving new revelations and authorized to speak on behalf of the church-used racist views about black people’s supposed spiritual inferiority to justify excluding black men from the priesthood and preventing black couples from marrying in Mormon temples. Since the 1970s Mormon and non-Mormon historians alike working outside the hierarchy have published scores of journal articles and books detailing the origins of the priesthood ban and other church practices.īut for Mormons (or Mormon observers like me), it is the new lesson of how the LDS Church has historically dealt with issues of race, and how it deals with them today, that is most significant. For scholars of Mormonism, there is little new in the 2,000-word history lesson (not including some two-dozen supporting footnotes) that an anonymous group of officially sanctioned church historians composed. Mountain Time, the LDS Church added a new lesson on race and church history to its “Gospel Topics” website, the church’s official resource for historical and theological issues. Yet, for some 35 years, the church hierarchy never directly addressed the ban’s origins and the beliefs used to justify it for more than 130 years-until now. That practice ended in 1978 when the church’s prophets received a revelation instructing them to do so.
2013 LDS SCRIPTURES FULL
And it did so, fittingly enough, in the form of a detailed history lesson.įor more than a century, Mormons barred black members from full participation in the church, most notably in the form of the “priesthood ban,” which kept black men from ordination in the all but universal (for men) Mormon priesthood. For the first time, the LDS Church recognized and repudiated its racist past.
Last Friday, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) made history by confronting its own history. (Courtesy of Darius Gray) Darius Gray, the first president of Genesis Group, a black Mormon support organization, speaks at the group’s first meeting in 1971.
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