A Double Standard for Mormonism?
Changing one’s mind can be a good thing or a bad thing.
Before evaluating one needs to know (at least!) two things: motivation and the value of the new opinion.
We don’t normally praise a man from moving to a new opinion for bad reasons or for shifting from the truth to falsehood.
His critics oft describe Governor Romney as a politician with no core. Over his long career in public life, which began as a boy on his father’s knee, Mr. Romney has changed his mind. I am unpersuaded he has done so more often than any other political figure. He is a decent man, but not yet a saint: unless you count the Latter Day kind.
It is here that desperate critics have hatched a new way to attack the man likely to be the next President of the United States. With some political risk, Mr. Romney has stayed true to the Church of his fathers: he is a Mormon. This appears to be proof positive that he has a core and will not choose expediently.
“Ah,” the critic says, “but the LDS Church itself is an ‘etch-a-sketch’ church. Look at changes in doctrine like that dealing with African persons in the priesthood.”
Now the critic has an immediate problem since all philosophical positions change with time.
Why attack Mormonism? Since all decent Americans believe that the change on issues like the priesthood was a good one, the criticism is surely not with the change.
The general line of attack is challenge the motives for the change or the reasoning for it. First, the critic argues the “noble” change was driven by a need to increase “market share.” It was a politically or economically motivated shift.
The problem with such a charge is that it will prove impossible to refute. The LDS claims it came as a result of divine revelation, but “hidden” motives are always possible. The LDS community was under pressure to change their point of view, so the skeptic can always claim they did so for ignoble reasons. What is a citizen to do?
He must do to other people what he would have done to him. Motives often are hard to judge and so a veil of charity should be placed over the motives of those groups we might be inclined to attack. What else can we do? The hurricane winds of hatred unleashed by any other course would tear the Republic to pieces.
“But the teachings of the Church are still racist!,” says the critic. “Look at the documents,” he says. “Look at the statements of the founders of Mormonism such as Young.”
A nation whose greatest President was a slaveholder, George Washington, has long learned to judge men by the standards of their times. It is true that the Founding generation of America defended race-based slavery. Many did so on secular grounds and a few on Christian ones. The least religious portion of the nation, the South before the Civil War, kept slavery longest, but most white Americans were infected with racism.
It is our ugly original sin as a nation.
As far as I can tell, and I am no Mormon and no expert, some of the Founders of Mormonism were no better than their times on race. Some Mormons owned slaves. Some Mormons, including important ones like Young, made racist statements wrapped in theology. However, this racism need no more be part of contemporary Mormon doctrine than the precedent of Washington having slaves in the President’s house (which continued for decades) need keep our culture racist forever.
Mormons have moved on. Young could have been inspired in some areas and not in others . . . a distinction Mormon theology made even at the time! If Washington City can still be named for a slave holder, I see no reason BYU must change her name!
As for Mormon Scriptures, reading old documents for a living makes me charitable to them. I do not see any passage in the Book of Mormon that is “white supremacist” by nature. A charitable reading of the text, like that I would give Plato or the Bible, shows alternative readings to difficult passages. It is true that Joseph may have translated the Book with the language of his time, but this language was amazingly elevated for a man of his background and education. In fact, it is amazing to me that the Book of Mormon actually has an elevated view of native Americans, Jewish people, and other persons of color given the period in which Joseph lived.
We must also look at the life of the contemporary Mormon church. It does not show any evidence of being a “white supremacist” movement. In fact, the next few decades should see the balance of power shifting fully from North America to the developing world.
When my grandmother was a little girl, secular teachers told her that African-Americans were inferior. She was taught to pity them and that science supported racism. Only her church softened these claims. Genesis taught her that all men and women were designed from the same original pair. The concept of “race” itself was foreign to Scripture. Her schooling failed her . . . but I do not, therefore, condemn schooling.
Secularists have shaken off their racist past and charity commands we allow them to do so. The eugenic ramblings of Sanger and the white-power rants of Jack London are in the past. I can enjoy “Call of the Wild” in any case.
Mormons must not be held to a higher standard. The Church claims divine revelation clarified old assumptions. Mr. Romney rejoiced in that change. Nobody has charged Mr. Romney with racism . . . and the modern Mormon church shows commendable growth in leadership of color.
In short, as a non-LDS person, I see no reason in Mormon Scriptures or teachings (as defined by the LDS community) to think the LDS church “racist” or founded on racism . . . except by the same accidental historica associations that exist in the American founding.
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DavidWalser on 28 Oct 2012 at 8:34 pm #
Just FYI: When I was a young boy, my parents taught us that we did not know why blacks were denied the priesthood. We were taught that someday the Lord would grant them that privilege and that we should pray for that day to come. I was serving my mission when that day came. It was a great day!
I mention this only so others might have some insight as to the attitude that prevailed within the Church during my youth. I wasn’t taught that blacks were inferior to other races. Instead, I was taught that we were all part of the same human family.
coltakashi on 28 Oct 2012 at 10:41 pm #
The first Mormons were from New York,New England, Pennsylvania and Ohio. In 1836 the first major missionary effort took place in Great Britain, so that by the time of the Mormon exodus to the Rocky Mountains, most Mormons came from England, Wales and Scandinavia. The vast majority of Mormons had never participated in or felt the.need to justify the practice of slavery. The subsistence farming of early western agriculture was.not adaptable to plantation farms growing crops for export, especially before the arrival of the railroad.
If Mormons had been “white supremacists” they acted very strangely by making major efforts to recruit both American.Indians and polynesians. In 1901 they opened missionary efforts in Japan, and in Latin America. If Mormons wanted a whites only church, they were going about it in a strange manner. The fastest growing area for the CJCLDS is now in Africa, where a full generation has elapsed and thete are.now second generation African Mormons.
Peopke like Andrew Sulluvan who try to attach a smell of racism to Mitt Romney over something that hasn’t existed for 35 years remind me of the Japanese man we missionaries encountered on the streets of Kofu. He told Elder Kapolulu that Mormons were prejudiced against blacks. Elder Kapolulu, a Chinese Hawaiian from Honolulu pointed to his own very dark complexioned face and said “Mite goran!” (“Look!”)
coltakashi on 28 Oct 2012 at 10:54 pm #
Let me add another point. The specific reason Mormons rejoiced when the announcement came in 1978 that the former restriction in priesthood ordination had been rescinded was because most of us knew black Mormons who who would be directly benefited by the change. Soon after the announcement, Romney ordained a faithful black member of his congregation in Boston. I learned that a man I had helped teach and baptize four years earlier in Colorado had moved to Atlanta and was ordained there. The announcement was poignant because it was personal.
I was just graduating from law school in Utah, and there was no particular pressure on the CJCLDS to change. The government recognized it was a religious issue that only concerned blacks who chose to be Mormons.
coltakashi on 29 Oct 2012 at 4:46 am #
The allegation that the Book of Mormon is “racist” is a demonstration that people never read the Book of Mormon, but only pass along a few sentences ripped out of context.
The Book if Mormon states explicitly that “black and white, bond and free, all are alike unto God”. The point of the passage and others like it is the same one that was made to Peter in the vision that prepared him to accept Cornelius the gentile into the Church of Christ, that ancestry does not matter, that God is not a respector of persons, and does not prejudge them. In fact, anyone who actually reads the Book of Mormon understands that there are no “black” people in the modern sense of having African ancestry, because the main narrative takes place between 600 BC and 400 AD, and the only groups it explicitly names are all Israelites and refugees from the destruction if Jerusalem by Babylon. The two “races” in the narrative are literal cousins, descended from and named after two brothers who disagreed over the the course of righteousness. Furthermore, anyone who actually reads the book knows that during most of the narrative, tge anti-Christian group is repeatedly supplemented by dissenting factions from the explicitly Christian group, while eventually during the first century BC major portions of the anti-Christian group are converted and join the Christian polity. Eventually there is isa major inversion, in which true Chrustians become the minority among the descendants if the righteous brother while the majority of the descendants of the unrighteous brother have converted. Amidst all of this confluct, the recorders and the editors of the record make it clear that all these tribes and factions are in fact “brethren”, all descendants of Israel, and related through common ancestors who were born in Jerusalem contemporary with Jeremiah. The differences among this extended family are religious, not racial, and religion is clearly a choice for each new generation, regardless of what its ancestors believed.
The assertion by critics of Mormonism that the Book of Mormon is racist is just another hypocritical demonstration of ignorance and prejudice. Does it never occur to such accusers to ask themselves why the Book of Mormon is actually a major basis of the conversion of Africans to the CJCLDS? When the priesthood restriction was ended in 1978, there thousands of people in Ghana and Nigeria who had informally organized themselves as Mormon believers because they had been converted by reading copies of the Book of Mormon. Those people are still the core of the LDS Church in those nations, where membership is over a hundred thousand. The Mormons of Ghana and Nigeria, and since then of Kenya, the Congo, Mozambique and a dozen other nations in Africa, are a living testimony that the Book of Mormon is a testament of Christ that offers a message of salvation to all humanity. Whether you are affronted by the assertion tgat the book is scripture parralel to the New Testament or not, if you are going to pass judgment on its contents, you should at least have the integrity to know what it really says, and not rely on gossip and the belief that some other group of people is benighted and ignorant, and of less worth in the eyes of God. It was not an accident that the Ku Klux Klan hated (and even lynched) Mormons in the same way they hated blacks.
JMReynolds on 29 Oct 2012 at 9:32 am #
“The Book of Mormon” is very progressive on issues of ethnicity for an ancient document (assuming for the moment it is an ancient document.)
Race of course did not exist as a category in the ancient world . . . and does not exist as a category (in my opinion) in “The Book of Mormon.” On the whole, the discussion of ethnicity would tend to support LDS claims that the book is ancient.
Finally, if “The Book of Mormon” is the product of Joseph Smith it shows very progressive views on ethnicity taken as a whole (the story arc) for the times in which Joseph lived. It compares very well, for example, with the views of the younger Lincoln.
Let me repeat: I am not a Mormon.
kgbudge on 29 Oct 2012 at 1:17 pm #
I know of no better discussion of the Priesthood revelation than this one, if you don’t mind a bit of a read: https://byustudies.byu.edu/showTitle.aspx?title=7885
I was sixteen when the revelation was announced. The reaction in my family and local Mormon congregation can fairly be described as excited joy, as described by the linked article. It was not until almost four years later that I met my first Mormon who was not happy about the revelation. I was in the deep South at the time, and this seemed to be a reflection of lingering prejudice in the South generally. I hasten to add that I met a great many southern Mormons at that time who were just as happy about the revelation as I was.
As the Church has stated in some of its press communications, we do not know when, where, or why the priesthood ban started. There is no record of any revelation to Joseph Smith or his successors instituting the ban. All that is known is that Joseph Smith ceased ordaining blacks towards the end of his life, and Brigham Young later formalized the ban and suggested a doctrinal basis for it. His explanation was similar to 19th century theories about race that were unhappily popular throughout the United States among many denominations.
My own, very unauthoritative, belief is that the ban had no doctrinal basis. I see none in our scriptures. My (very unauthoritative) speculation is that it was a policy aimed at trying to reduce hostility to the Church at a time when ordaining black men in a church attended by white men was all but unheard of, and more than a bit scandalous, even in Northern circles. In the context of a country headed for civil war over issues of race, a temporary suspension of the ordination of blacks may have been prudent even in the sight of God. But then it hardened into a settled permanent policy, which lingered long past its expiration date.
Rockgod28 on 30 Oct 2012 at 1:07 pm #
America was murderously racist.
A fact since 1831 when the South banned blacks from reading and writing. It only got worse from there. Many people forget or don’t bother to learn about the history of the United States or only know the most simplified version. The revolution was about self-governance and taxation as a compulsory means to deny the local congress assemblies of the colonies any political power or authority.
While history is fascinating lets skip to the Civil War. The war was again about governance and which part of government held the most power the States or the Federal central government? Slavery was an issue, but it was a minor one compared to the rights of the states to determine their own economy. The importation of slaves ended by about 1809 legally by all the states according to the constitution twenty years before.
So what was the problem. Racism. In 1856 a slave was determined to be 3/5 of a person. There were thousands of lies and theories to why those who were black were inferior to other races in some ways. To justify racism.
England was threatening to enter the civil war on the side of the Confederates. Lincoln then issued the Emancipation Proclamation which ended Slavery if the South did not end the war. If war was about Slavery the President of the Union just gave the South the opportunity to keep their slaves and end the war. But they did not. Abraham Lincoln just made the American Civil War about Slavery which England had outlawed. To side with the South would be to side with slavers which was morally offensive to the British.
The civil war ended and slavery was abolished, but not racism. It actually got worse. The Klan was born from the ashes of the South, but did not gain significant political power until 1915. They were everywhere and were most definitely murderous.
It was this way until 1944. It took a lot of work and many lives for America to repent of racism. My speculation for why blacks did not hold the priesthood in the LDS Church was mostly for them, not to protect the Church. Many speculated it had something to do with blacks, but I believe that is incorrect. It was to protect the country and everyone from the judgements of God. That is my honest opinion.
In the meantime, Go Romney/Ryan! 2012!