Are Mormons Racists? Have they Been Historically?
(Up till 1900) Part 1
Published June 2018
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has been around as an institution for almost 200 years. It now has been forty years since the Church policy was introduced as Official Declaration 2; the public announcement of a change of Church policy that allowed all worthy males, regardless of skin color or ethnic heritage, in particular permitting those of black African descent, to have the priesthood and be endowed in the holiest rites of the Latter-day Saint temples.
Until that time in June 1978 there was a restrictive LDS Church policy that excluded blacks from the priesthood authority--more or less since the 1850s-- precluding black men or boys of African heritage from possessing the priesthood, which generally meant excluding all black people from the opportunity of the temple covenants that Latter-day Saints consider essential for eternal blessings and exaltation with God. Blacks could join the Church through baptism and be more nominal members, but they were not permitted to advance in the rites of power, ministry, or special sanction to advance farther in its precepts.
In the 21st century people deem this racist, or racially prejudiced, religiously or institutionally, which is fair to assess in the modern lens of scrutiny. But was it based on hate, or something else? Were there other factors at play? Were there any legitimate Godly reasons that this policy was put in place? There are racial and racist policies, practices, and behaviors to contemplate when it comes to the Latter-day Saint movement of the last 200 years. Some of it might also be qualified as prejudiced, exclusionary, elitist, or exclusive.
The answers are not available here in my thoughts, but there are things to consider.
This post will serve as a review of the accusations or considerations of what an institution or religious people like the LDS (Mormons) are in the way of being "racist", or perhaps not overtly racist like other groups that have been directly hurtful or are to be considered oppressive throughout their history. It begins in the United States during the controversial and debated times of African-American slavery in the US South, not to mention general attitudes of the maltreatment of the native Americans across the continent.
The 1830s and 1840s
The Latter-day Saint peoples, nicknamed as Mormons because of this new scriptural book that they declared known as the Book of Mormon, were officially established in April of 1830 in upstate New York. Joseph Smith Junior had a decade prior to this time while he was composing his ideas and formation of the faith, claimed as Restorational Christianity. Joseph Smith Junior said that this Church was the newly restored Church of Jesus Christ from the days of old. And thus the movement began, moving from New York to Ohio and Missouri, later Illinois and other surrounding states and countries until Joseph was martyred in 1844.
Joseph, the charismatic and authoritative leader of this new faith, himself in these times baptized and ordained male black African-Americans, freemen, with the priesthood before he himself died, during those first 14 years of Church history. The Church members were heavily persecuted, even unto death, in most of the places that they settled and congregated. The suffering and hostilities were the worst in Missouri, a slave state, where Mormons were partially hated or distrusted for their lack of slave beliefs and lifestyle.
On these two counts alone, the LDS faith could not be accused of being racist against blacks from the 1830s and most of the 1840s, the time of its inception and hold on the lands where it was founded.
Conclusion for the 1830s and 1840s: The LDS Church was not racist towards blacks or any other ethnic group in these formative years. It did consider itself elite, however, disclaiming the authority of the priesthoods and authorities of other Christian faiths throughout the world. But, this elite stance did not affect how the LDS leadership or believers treated non-white people. White LDS members actually bore the brunt in large part by not upholding slavery, especially in Missouri. Smith proposed ideas of a political nature to free the African-American slaves before his premature death in 1844.
The 1850s
Brigham Young succeeded Joseph Smith as prophet and Church president by 1847, famously leading the Saints from Nauvoo, Illinois, to the Great Salt Lake Valley that would later become Utah. This occurred after Smith and other Saints were forced out of many settlements and in extreme cases killed. By the 1850s, Young's prophetic policy instilled on the followers was to not allow African-Americans to have the rights to the priesthood of God that the Church espoused. By the 1850s the practice of plural marriage was heavily practiced by many of the Mormon faith, therefore Washington DC and the United States had serious qualms and concerns with the LDS peoples concentrated in the Inter-Mountain West. Maybe this was more convenient for President and Governor Young, to maintain this type of exclusive (some interpret as hateful) policy in those times, maybe in order to not incur further minority ostracism as a "strange and peculiar people"?
Because of plural marriage among those Saints, Utah did not become a state; this unusual Western religious and social construct was deemed a "barbarous" practice, like slavery, by the rest of the well-minded United States. Polygamy was even compared in grave nefariousness to slavery; for political reasons the Utah territory was excluded from regular US involvement and consideration. Rather Utah remained a US federal territory with enough inhabitants to be elevated to a state, like Oregon or California, but the US congress would not approve of its people to have those rights.
Conclusion for the 1850s: The newly developing and transitional Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was exclusionary, implementing racial policies that in modern terms would be considered racist, because black people could no longer have lay priesthood leadership or inner covenant powers through the temple, intrinsic to being a Mormon. However, some of the original members of African heritage who were integrated and ordained by the earlier Church leadership (1830-40s) managed to cross the US plains, continued to be part and parcel of the LDS faith and its greater expansion across the US West, to include Salt Lake City founders. The Mormons fled the Midwest under duress, as well as international converts from Great Britain and the rest of mostly Northern Europe, most of whom were white. Mormons were known as non-slave owners, while they suffered the newfound stigma of polygamy, thus inhibiting their integration within the tapestry of the normal American people, slave owning or no.
The 1860s
The 1860s brought the slavery issue to a head in the United States, thus affecting racial policy for the whole nation. The LDS Church and its people actually benefited from the Civil War because federal troops that were occupying Latter-day Saint owned properties in the Utah territory were called back East to be deployed in the US's biggest trial to date, starting with the rebellion at Fort Sumter and ending at Appomatax. Meanwhile the Mormon crossing of the US plains came to an end, the LDS peoples of Utah, Idaho, Arizona, and other settlements of the West in Nevada and California continued to prosper. Brother Brigham was a savvy settler and leader. The boon of children from multiple wife families helped the growth.
But as the Civil War ended, the attention of the US government re-focused on these off-spurt Mormon westerners. Polygamy had become the rallying cry for US eastern based leaders to decry Mormonism. Again, perhaps LDS Church leadership thought that taking in black African members was too heavy an additional burden to bear . However, perhaps the idea of integrating black people it was not that "black and white", pardon the pun. The rest of the US was not that prone, like everyone in those times, to suddenly turn most things into shared mixed white and black environments, despite the emancipation and new-found freedoms of that decade.
Conclusion for the 1860s: The LDS faith became more entrenched into its physical habitats, as well as more solidified in its doctrinal practices, which included polygamy, which made it a pariah to outsiders. It fought heavily to maintain these gains, while blacks were not a large part of its concern. While the small minority of Mormons, mostly white, heavily European immigrants, in the US west fought to have their say, their lives established, create their Zion, aka utopia, the freed Africans in the East, some moving west but most staying east of the Mississippi, had their own gains to make. Racist? By default Mormons were not actively involved in most African-Americans' lives, but rather taking a different space of struggle. I think the LDS might be considered more isolationist than racist in the 1860s.
The 1870s
Brigham Young had passed on the mantle of leadership by the 1870s (by death); the British born Canadian-based John Taylor becoming the third leader of this outlier group headquartered in the Great Salt Lake. Numbers continued to grow as well as their influence. As stated, the numbers of Utah residents were sufficient for statehood like other states becoming so, but the US government could not accept polygamy. The Saints continued to grow, as we assume blacks freed across the United States were doing in much greater numbers. LDS missionaries were going out from Utah and elsewhere to places of "color", including Latin America and the South Pacific. Incidentally, since the early days of Joseph Smith, the LDS outreach to American Indian was always considered a priority. While making inroads among non-white populations, Mormons and most African-Americans were largely separate. When LDS missionaries would travel the US parts of the East, or Canada, they would not proselytize among black populations.
Conclusion of the 1870s: While the LDS Church maintained its policy of non-black inclusion of the priesthood and consequent temple rights, it was making attempts to diversify racially and ethnically both domestically and abroad.
The 1880s
The 1880s brought the polygamy issue to its climatic evolution of US controlled existence: it was abolished based on the pressures of the United States government's heavy power over its sovereign lands, combined with the succumbing of the fourth LDS president Woolford Woodruff and the LDS Church to end the practice of plural marriage. Joseph Smith had, afterall, declared that the Church would abide by the laws of the land in which it was constituted. This decision ending plural marriage would lead to Utah statehood a decade (or 6 years) later. Much like the Official Declaration 2 of 1978, the 1890 manifesto created a large shift in Church policy towards normalizing socially to the rest of the Western world. This made Mormons more mainstream, but there was still much of its identity that made Latter-day Saints different. This social difference is part of what the faith attempts to achieve, like Biblical peoples of old: striving to achieve better, or higher standards, lived according to God and His leaders embodied in the Church hierarchy (the Brethren), so the people of God follow and obey Christ to achieve Zion.
Conclusion of the 1880s: After fighting mightily for its own existence, having its lands confiscated, leaders and polygamists arrested, and its underpinnings questioned at the highest levels, the LDS Church capitulated to the United States law of monogamy and continued to exist. Some members chose to flee the country to Canada and Mexico in order to salvage or maintain their way of life, which also encapsulated their families, their wives and children. The majority of Saints simply stopped the practice of plural marriage. While becoming less isolationist in this major regard, Mormons were still no closer to integration racially with African-Americans.
The 1890s
The 1890s was a new period for LDS integration into the United States and the world. It was now westernized as most Christian peoples, upholding monogamy as the highest virtue, which also had everything to do with temple marriages and family togetherness, known as "sealings". Blacks were still not privy to this invitation, noted. With Utah statehood came the struggles for the Latter-day Saints to be accepted as true Americans. This process would gradually occur, with the election and later acceptance of LDS Senators in Washington DC and across the country.
Meanwhile, African-Americans were going through many of the same struggles for rights and citizenship within their homeland, albeit with heavier tolls to pay. They, the majority of African-Americans, were coming from hundreds of years of true institutional racism under the awful auspices of bondage. Mormons, to this point in their existence, were if anything a help to American and other blacks in many ways. How?
1. Joseph Smith himself was friendly and even equitable to African-Americans from the get-go, later proposing a political solution for slavery that might have influenced Abraham Lincoln and others. Smith died at age 38, long before he could introduce or enact further emancipatory or other radical ideas that he had developed as a young revolutionary type, vastly different than the status quo that lead to the US Civil War, that he had predicted would begin in South Carolina.
2. The US Federal government was distracted by Brigham Young and the Mormon settlers before and during the Civil War, perhaps deflecting some of the unwanted attention that some US people used against slaves and freed slaves. Did any of these distractions, plus the constant opening of the non-slave "free" Western US, tip the power of anticipated power to the side of the abolitionists? I would argue yes. Mormon prosperity and expansion favored the entire nation, especially the enslaved African-Americans looking to the future of widened parameters of a new life, a new world.
3. Latter-day Saints developed and prospered through sacrifice and trials in much of the inter-mountain west, blazing a way for all Americans to take advantage of the abundance of prosperity available to all. Blacks likewise needed to expand past their agricultural confines of the South; Mormons were among others who showed that this was doable. California did not seem so hard after other interior portions of the US were becoming flourishing communities. California, Oregon, and other parts of the new America (won from Mexico in 1848, including the noble Mormon Battalion that marched in the longest US military march in the country's history, sacrificing while under duress of the crossing of the plains for the sake of the same government and peoples that had chased them, or at times not defended them, across the continent since its inception in 1830.)
4. The federal struggles against Mormon polygamy were in a sense much like what blacks were striving for: their own place, which was different than the standard white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, in an emerging American identity of a mixed soup of identities.
Conclusion of the 1890s and the 19th Century: The LDS Church drastically changed its founding practices of plural marriage in order to conform to US law and custom, and to be part of the rest of America. Similarly, freed African-American slaves were a generation into their own attempts at integration, acculturation, and normalization, or the lack thereof into US society. Both populations did not share much of the same space in the country, but both were trying to be fully American after distinct denials at those attempts. The new national sport of baseball, a northeast-US dominated movement, learned to segregate the players by race, thus entrenching a "separate but equal" tendency in US society as a whole.
Leading up to the year 1900, the United States had grown and developed into a superpower, evidenced by the Spanish-American War, the territorial gains and advances by the turn of the century, and its economic might, due in many parts to the labors of blacks and Mormons. Minorities across the spectrum were amalgamating into the United States and elsewhere. LDS practices and membership had taken hold in the South Pacific and Latin America, and also in parts of Europe where economically or politically hungry Italians, Irish, eastern European Jews, and other minorities began their influx into the land of Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, inviting the tired and poor masses to its vast shores.
The United States had become a land of opportunity and a bulwark of hope and freedom for the entire world. It would prove this fact in the century to come. African-Americans and Latter-day Saints had to prove their part in this land and elsewhere, but they both had been a part of this amazing process for decades, even centuries in the case of African-Americans. The policies of the LDS Church and its members would eventually see how this great experiment of mixing and combining strengths would transpire, especially in regards to those of black African descent.
Statements of a Believer in 2018
The ideas and impact of Jesus Christ, and later Mormon leaders aspiring to His teachings in this the modern age, has ever been expansive and grand. The freedom and power of God have been promised repeatedly and assuredly to the children of God throughout the ages, from Adam and Eve until the present. The message has never changed, but the standards and policies have evolved.
It is worth reflecting on the trajectory and development of all the earth's peoples of every shade and hue, of every tongue and belief. God's plans are vast and mysterious. Has the movement, now global, of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints helped all of humanity? Has it hated some, and only favored some others?
At a certain point, in a certain time and age, God has promised that we will all be one. All human kind, bond and free, white and dark, no matter our outer shell or description. As one humble chronicler of the human condition, I choose to see how these threads and tapestries weave together to make us who we are becoming and we ultimately wish to be.
It's exciting! It has been hard and tragic too often, but as many say, this road of human existence has been worth it. God has a Plan, we maintain; things are on course by way of our faith in that Plan, and we His creations, His children, must learn how to understand and accept it.
Reflect on.
See Part II: 1900 to the 1930s.
