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| Religion Forum Index » Christian Forum - General Discussion » THE RACIST PAST OF MORMONISM...... |
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| Sword of Laban... |
 Posted: Tue Oct 27, 2009 5:17 pm |
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Mormonism’s Black Issues
By Joanna Brooks
October 25, 2009
While many Mormons would like to forget the Church’s history of
discrimination against blacks, an Apostle’s recent statements
comparing the post-Proposition 8 Mormon backlash to the Civil Rights-
era harassment of black voters have brought that painful past back
into the spotlight.
Mormon Apostle Dallin Oaks chose a friendly audience deep within the
Book-of-Mormon-belt for his now controversial October 13 speech in
defense of the Mormons’ ongoing fight against same-sex civil
marriage.
Speaking to students at Brigham Young University-Idaho, Oaks decried
the continuing erosion of religious freedom and the declining
influence of religion in the public sphere, before mounting a strongly-
worded defense of “the ancient order” of marriage against the “alleged
‘civil right’ of same-gender couples to enjoy the privileges of
marriage.”
Elder Oaks recalled expressions of outrage directed at Mormons and
acts of vandalism against Mormon temples and wardhouses committed
after the November 2008 passage of Proposition 8 outlawing same-sex
marriage in California. (Mormons, who make up 2% of California’s
population, contributed more than 50% of the individual donations to
the Proposition 8 campaign and a sizeable majority of its on-the-
ground efforts.) The post-Proposition 8 backlash was, he stated,
comparable to Civil Rights Movement-era “voter intimidation of blacks
in the South.”
Oaks, a former University of Chicago law professor who clerked for
United States Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren in 1957 and 1958
in the aftermath of the Warren court’s landmark Brown vs. Board of
Education (1954) desegregation decision, knew that his black-Mormon
comparison would draw public attention. In fact, when he previewed his
speech for an AP reporter on October 12, he speculated that it might
“be offensive to some.”
Sure enough, commentators from within (and without) the world of
Mormonism have questioned the soundness of Oaks’ analogy, asking
whether Mormons in their effort to eliminate same-sex marriage are
more justly characterized as proponents of religious freedom or
opponents of gay human rights. In fact, four Mormon gay rights groups
issued a joint statement on October 16 urging the Apostle to consider
how the Mormon anti-gay marriage effort might paradoxically compromise
religious freedom for members of faiths that recognize the sanctity of
committed same-sex relationships.
But most of Oaks’ respondents politely sidestepped an even deeper
paradox troubling his black-Mormon analogy: the fact that Mormons have
our own long and peculiar history of discrimination against African
Americans.
MSNBC commentator Keith Olbermann alluded to this history when he gave
Oaks his daily “worst person in the world” award on October 14.
Comparing the Proposition 8 Mormon backlash and the harassment of
black voters was especially inappropriate, Olbermann argued, because
Mormons had been “on the wrong side of integration.”
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints prohibited individuals
of African descent from joining the Church’s lay priesthood (open to
all devout Mormon men over the age of twelve), serving as
missionaries, or participating in Mormon temple ordinances from 1849
until 1978, a fact that many Mormons today find difficult to talk
about or explain.
In the earliest years of Mormon history, during the 1830s and 1840s,
six or seven African-American men including Elijah Abel (1808–1885)
and Walker Lewis (1798–1856) were ordained to the Church’s priesthood.
But under the leadership of Mormon Church president Brigham Young, the
ordination of African-American men ceased, African-American men and
women were prohibited from temple worship, and intermarriage was
officially discouraged.
Some historians believe that Young’s about-face on the status of
African Americans may have been motivated by embarrassment stemming
from an 1847 scandal involving an excommunicated African-American
Mormon named William McCary, or by political pressures surrounding the
extension of slavery to Utah territory.
Whatever the actual motivation for the priesthood ban, Mormons soon
articulated a number of working theological narratives to legitimate
anti-African American discrimination, drawing liberally from European
and European-American folk theologies that identified Africans and
African Americans as the descendents of Cain or Ham.
According to some Mormons, the priesthood ban was an element of the
curse placed upon Cain for killing his brother Abel (Genesis 4), or
the curse levied on Ham’s son Canaan to punish Ham’s humiliation of
his father, Noah (Genesis 9:20-27). The Pearl of Great Price, a Mormon
book of scripture, described the people of Canaan as being cursed with
“blackness” (Moses 7:5- and indicated that descendents of Ham and
his wife Egyptus were “cursed... as pertaining to the
Priesthood” (Abraham 1:21-26).
In 1849, Brigham Young declared that “the Lord had cursed Cain’s seed
with blackness and prohibited them the Priesthood,” a position he
reaffirmed in a January 16, 1852 statement to the Utah territorial
legislature:
Any man having one drop of the seed of [Cain]… in him cannot hold the
priesthood and if no other Prophet ever spake it before I will say it
now in the name of Jesus Christ I know it is true and others know it.
Another rationale for Mormon discrimination against African Americans
was articulated in 1845 by Mormon Apostle Orson Hyde, who speculated
that the cursed condition of African Americans was a consequence of
their actions during their premortal existence.
Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these
doctrines gained traction while memories of early African-American
priesthood holders like Elijah Abel faded; Church leaders continued to
prohibit temple ordinances and priesthood ordination for Church
members with as little as “1/32” African-American ancestry. In 1949,
the First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints issued a statement declaring that the black priesthood ban was
a “direct commandment from the Lord, on which is founded the doctrine
of the Church from the days of its organization.”
The rise of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s actually
spurred some Mormon leaders to renew their support for discrimination.
In a 1954 speech at Brigham Young University, Apostle Mark E. Peterson
denounced interracial marriage on theological grounds, arguing that
“if there is one drop of Negro blood in my children... they receive
the curse [of Canaan]”; in 1958 Bruce R. McConkie wrote in Mormon
Doctrine that African Americans had been “less valiant in the pre-
existence,” and thus “sent to earth through the lineage of Cain.”
Speaking from the pulpit at a semi-annual Church Conference in 1965,
Apostle Ezra Taft Benson (a former Secretary of Agriculture under
Eisenhower) charged that the Civil Rights Movement was a Communist
plot to destroy America.
Other Mormon leaders were more moderately disposed towards African
American equality. Historians credit Apostle Hugh B. Brown and Church
President David O. McKay with efforts to open the question of ending
the priesthood ban, even though both men maintained personal
misgivings about the Civil Rights Movement. In 1969, the First
Presidency of the Church issued an official statement expressing
support for full civil equality under the law for all citizens
regardless of race while defending the black priesthood ban as a
prerogative of religious freedom.
On June 8, 1978, the First Presidency of the Church of Jesus-Christ of
Latter-day Saints announced that “the long-promised day has come when
every faithful, worthy man in the Church may receive the holy
priesthood,” effectively ending the prohibition on full African
American participation. The announcement was accepted as revelation by
an affirmation of the Church membership at the October Church General
Conference and subsequently canonized as scripture.
In the years since the repeal of the priesthood ban, a number of
official steps have been taken to correct prejudice within the Church.
The Church published a new edition of the Book of Mormon in 1981,
replacing a promise that the righteous would become “white” with a
promise that they would be made “pure” (2 Nephi 30:6), but leaving
intact a handful of other Book of Mormon scriptures correlating dark
skin with spiritual accursedness. In 1990, Helvecio Martins, an Afro-
Brazilian Mormon, became the first man of African descent to be
ordained as one of the Church’s General Authorities. African-American
Mormons and their allies have also undertaken a number of unofficial
efforts to raise consciousness about Black Mormon experience and
concerns, like the well-received 2007 documentary Nobody Knows: The
Untold Story of Black Mormons. (Experts estimate there are now about 1
million Mormons of African descent worldwide.)
But without an official, explicit clarification of earlier teachings
on race, many older Mormons continue to quietly maintain and circulate
old beliefs connecting blackness and the priesthood ban to the Cain-
Ham genealogy or to lack of spiritual valiance in pre-earthly life.
Younger Mormons born after the end of the priesthood ban, and raised
in what one prominent black Mormon has described as Mormonism’s
“deafening silence” on race, have little knowledge of the Church’s
history of discrimination and few resources for coming to terms with
it.
Indeed, Mormons may now have a greater sense of their own historical
persecution as a religious minority than they do a sense of
responsibility for the Mormon Church’s discriminatory history. Whereas
Mormonism’s African-American problem is rarely discussed within
mainstream orthodox Mormon circles, stories about nineteenth-century
anti-Mormon mob violence, the state of Missouri’s 1838 Mormon
“extermination order,” the assassination of Joseph Smith Jr., and the
subsequent exodus to Utah are frequently recounted. Last November’s
protests directed at Mormon temples and wardhouses after the election
only confirmed and intensified Mormons’ deeply-held sense of
marginalization and persecution.
Elder Oaks’ October 13 analogy between African Americans and Mormons
mobilized this sense of persecution and galvanized Mormon same-sex
marriage opponents, just as Maine’s Proposition 1 campaign to ban same-
sex marriage enters its home stretch and last-minute fundraising
appeals from the National Organization for Marriage find their way
into Mormon same-sex marriage activists’ inboxes.
http://www.truthandgrace.com/racism.htm |
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