Are the Latter-day Saints Racists? Part III
The question posed is worth scrutinizing. Has the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints overtly or implicitly been racist during its history? In short, yes. Racially exclusive? That is more accurate. Mormons certainly never owned slaves or anyone, never advocated slavery or Jim Crow laws, never lynched or castigated black people. That is Racism with a capital R, let us be clear. But for many years the Church excluded blacks from the priesthood and leadership, and in that sense was racist.
However, there is more to it than that pat answer. There are other considerations to weigh and ponder. The Church has been racially exclusive much of its history, but has also had racial impacts on African-Americans and others in good ways. This was from the 1850s until 1978; now they are chapters of the past, but they are part of the whole picture of this organized faith.
Part of the story of the context of racism is: how is the Church and its membership with race relations now (in 2018 and the last decades)? In what direction is it currently moving? Who has the LDS Church been racist against? How has it been racially stratified, in the United States, and in other countries? Did the racial policies and practices, institutional and collective, have negative impacts against blacks or other minorities throughout the Church's history and outreach from its US base and across the globe? One could make many arguments of the affirmative, that yes, Latter-day Saint policies and statements of the past have damaged race relations in the the United States and elsewhere, not helping certain minorities when it could have or should have, particularly blacks. But is there a trend toward healing and better outreach and support, even racial progress in the last 50 years? I will argue that yes, the Church and its racial policies and impacts are coming along in strong fashion.
I will also argue that based on past practices and policies since its legal inception in 1830, the overall impact of Mormons towards African-Americans in the United States has actually had influences and efforts towards black freedoms and rights in positive manners. Mormons were hated, persecuted, and chased from Missouri in the 1830s for not being pro-slave. Joseph Smith Junior, as a presidential candidate in 1844, proclaimed a solution to slavery as a candidate and pundit at the national level; he became popular to many across the country, and died that same year while jailed in Illinois. In a state, a place where Lincoln himself was to later spring forth from. Coincidence? No, Lincoln knew of Smith. Most likely inspired in some degree.
The Mormon settlers of the West opened up pathways to increased American prosperity and freedom, much of which was used by white, black, and others to expand their worlds. The Utah War and later Congressional laws against polygamy distracted the Federal government of some degree that blacks or Indians (or others, like Mexicans or Chinese, or Jews), were the only "threats" to US hegemony. In the end, the diversity of the Saints, hardworking and industrious, and patriotic, added to the overwhelming fact that the United States experiment was so much more than the sum of its parts. America, in its incredible diverse panoply of ethnicities and beliefs, was one great nation, under God. (With freedom to not be under God, if so chosen).
However, as always, the racial exclusionary dialog of the past continues for many in the the modern mind and 21st century conscience: Is this an argument that LDS priesthood and temple policies of the past were wrong and hurtful? That the Church was guided under false or flawed values and morals, poorly inspired, if at all? Not necessarily. The more complex answer is that throughout the history of the LDS faith, Mormons and their leaders have faced pressures of many types upon their own existence and sustainment, therefore the question of hostile or aggressive racism, which could be argued even against the Church and its members towards native Americans, as broached in many text books and articles, is that the answers are not "black and white". No pun intended. Racial accusations are not cut and dry assessments, but worth discussing and scrutinizing.
Previous blog posts have looked at earlier periods in LDS Church history in regards to race relations, leading up to this third segment.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints did have a policy starting in the 1850s under its second president (Brigham Young) that excluded blacks of African descent from having the priesthood authority for worthy males, which precluded black people from reaching the highest pinnacle of membership: being sealed as families in the holy temples. This policy and practice, and many authoritative statements of past leaders reaffirmed the different status of those of particularly the black/African-American minority. Things would eventually change in 1978; all worthy males were declared eligible to hold the priesthood and enter the temple for its highest rites and blessings.
The following decade by decade analysis will show numbers in the US and globally to illustrate that the demographics of Mormonism are growing towards all inclusiveness, thus making Latter-Day Saint and African-Americans, or those in the greater context of African descendance, one people. All people are now considered and accepted as children of God, no divisions or racial prejudices or preferences. This is the current vision and purpose of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, offering its open invitation to partake in its membership and blessings, its cause, as a Restoration of all things, to all people everywhere.
1940s:
LDS Overall: 862,000
African-American: 12.7 million
The United States made a huge leap racially in the 1940s (1947) by finally integrating baseball. Jackie Robinson, number 42, is forever lauded as the first African-American pioneer to break that American barrier of separate worlds in the United States of the major leagues, with the Brooklyn Dodgers. World War II (1941-45) proved, for large measure, that the races of our soldiers and marines and other fighters were equally important to all, that we were indeed an integrated society depending on one another, that we all bled red, and races were not to divide us in the most essential ways. But things were still not fair for all, not by a long shot.
The Church of Jesus Christ had not made a million members worldwide yet, but had become a force within the country. And, as most people then and now will admit or recognized, this was a distinct and unified religious and cultural minority. Mormons were different and peculiar, and not only white Caucasian, but regardless of their ethnic biology, Mormon meant it was a different stripe of the American fabric or tapestry. It is interesting to note that all minorities of the United States help in making this nation (and world) a more diverse and stronger force. Mormons were becoming this, and arguably African-Americans as well were bringing new and stronger contributions to the United States for centuries, from music to dance to science and sport, to language and cultural history.
Later giants such as Martin Luther King Junior and Alex Haley would prove definitively that blacks were a force and rich in their presence in the United States; without question the American culture as it became a dominant influence in the 20th century depended on the presence and gifts of the black community. Latter-day Saints were trying to become a light and power as well, as had Jewish-Americans, Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, Mexican-Americans, Cuban-Americans, Japanese Americans, Chinese-Americans, and on and on. Perhaps the original native Americans haven been the least appreciated of all. And yet they have given so much of their essence to who we are. Point being, all minorities, ethnic and religious, have combined to make the United States of the modern world the most powerful force and economy of the planet.
And this prosperity and "flowering of the rose (see language of the Book of Mormon referring to the Western Hemisphere)" dialog all falls in line with LDS doctrine: the Western Hemisphere, more than the Old Eastern Hemisphere, the long awaited promised land. Predicted or prophesied in the Book of Mormon and other modern scriptures and prophecies.
Would the Latter-day Saints, the proclaimed Restoration of All things, be able to incorporate more people, including those of all ethnic groups? The short answer is yes; how this happens bears some review.
1950s:
LDS Overall: 1.1 million
African-American: 15 million
Into the 1950s the Civil Rights movements of King, Jr., and others came to the forefront; African-Americans stood to win more normal everyday privileges of US citizenship, something long overdue. It was fought at a hard cost over many decades, especially in the South where numbers of blacks were greater. Admittedly and regrettably, the greatest nation on the planet, as far as power and influence, was still behind socially and economically. The LDS Church, still based more in the Inter-Mountain West with fewer numbers of African-Americans, was perhaps not helpful in its belief systems and practices in that respect towards black people nationwide. Mormon missionaries were now going to Brazil and a few other nations to peoples of color, where the priesthood question became more complicated.
The Latter-day Saint Church had reached a million members worldwide in the 1950s and grew at a rather fast pace, with a larger international and more ethnically diverse footprint. African-Americans were advancing in the United States, socially and economically, as was this faith that excluded them at its core levels.
1960s:
LDS Overall: 1.7 million
African-American: 18.8 million
The 1960s brought new-found prosperity to Latter-Day Saints in the United States as they became more mainstream and less constrained to the Mountain West, and it was an advantageous decade to blacks in social, political, and economic ways. Harmon Killebrew was a popular Mormon player in baseball while many blacks excelled in the sport, such as Willie Mays and Hank Aaron. There was also advancement in numbers and prestige with many Mormons worldwide, and to the newly independent African nations that were formerly colonized by Europe, affecting many black people throughout Africa, and even Latin America. As mentioned Brazil was a place of LDS growth, where often racial lines were ambiguous. Sometimes men and boys received that priesthood while people were not sure if they were black or not, thus making the exclusionary policy a slippery slope. By the end of the 1960s most of the LDS Church leadership were looking to see the policy ended. It had begun in the over a hundred years in the past for different reasons in a different time and place.
Some blame Brigham Young for many things: following through with the polygamy that he was taught by founder Joseph Smith, being somewhat harsh with his exclusivist policies in the the Greater Deseret (the place founded by his people that later became Utah in the Great Salt Lake), he was blamed for the Mountain Meadows Massacre in 1857, for opposing federal troops in the "Utah War" and the struggle for political and territorial control, and perhaps rightly blamed for the longest legacy of his presidency, that of excluding black people from priesthood membership. And this policy and practice lasted over a century.
The next decade (the latter part in it, June1978) would change everything for blacks and the priesthood. Although thought to be too little and too late for some, as far as the harsh judgments and conclusions that Mormonism equated racism and hatred as ascertained by some for all time. Certain Christians--both traditional and newer iterations--not to mention atheists or secular humanists, have criticized or attacked Mormonism and its believers of being isolated and false for its entire existence, from its first founder Joseph Smith and his claims, to the 16 successors who have followed him until 2018. The Church has always held bold claims about its authority that have been disputed and discounted, as many religions go. Its very creation was about declaring other religious traditions false or misguided, so turnabout seems to be fair play, or par for the course.
By the end of the 1960s, the United States was marching towards the legal and political means to ensure first class citizenship to the generations of African-Americans who had been denied so many basic rights do to factors of non-integration, voter gerrymandering, and a host of other unfair open and behind closed door practices of exclusion and bigotry.
While missionary efforts and members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were expanding significantly in foreign lands with many peoples of color in the 1960s, the canker of non-inclusiveness towards those of African-American and black descent was an issue. Things needed to change, and LDS leadership alluded to it privately and sometimes publicly for years that the time would come for more inclusiveness.
I have stated before in a previous post that in the early 1900s my descendants were neither Mormon nor black, so I look back on those times a bit separated from them as far as direct family. However, my parents joined the LDS faith in 1968, therefore establishing a personal link to the movements and dynamics of the discussion of "race and the Church". Both my father and mother had served happily in the Peace Corps in West Africa (Togo, Sierra Leone) in the mid-1960s; they had learned to love, respect, and appreciate the black people that they served and knew in that span. Their only real concern with joining the church a few short years later was the fact that blacks could not receive the priesthood. 10 years later this concern was finally resolved. Although yes, for some people the pain of exclusion of the past still stings, and causes many others to doubt the validity or sanctity of a faith that had the policy in the first place.
See the next post for more regarding the opening and inclusion of blacks with the priesthood and temple blessings in the LDS faith, officially starting in 1978.
