BYU prof: Mormons aren't ashamed of pre-1978 segregation
Posted December 13, 2007
by Frank Lockwood
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
DES MOINES, Iowa — Forty years ago, while Mitt Romney served as a missionary in France, black men were not allowed to set foot in a Mormon temple.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints barred black men from the priesthood, which is conferred on virtually all faithful white Mormon men and boys ages 12 and up.
As a result, blacks were not allowed to become missionaries, to distribute the Lord’s Supper, to have their marriages “sealed for time and eternity” or to serve as elders, bishops, apostles and prophets.
It abandoned those policies in 1978, but not the scriptures that undergirded them. Its teachings will likely become a thorny campaign issue if former Massachusetts Gov. Romney becomes the Republican presidential nominee, Mormon America author Richard Ostling predicted this week.
“I think it’s going to be used in some way by the Democrats, whether it’s a full-force public argument or whether it’s a whispering campaign or whether it’s something in between,” said Ostling, a former Time magazine and Associated Press religion writer. “I have to believe the Clinton apparatus has a bulging file on Mormon racial history.”
A Democratic National Committee spokesman declined to comment on the matter.
The church’s racial doctrines could alienate core Democratic constituencies, in addition to some conservative Catholics and evangelicals, Ostling said.
Passages in the Book of Mormon say dark skin is a sign of divine disfavor and a punishment from God. The church’s sacred writings describe mixed-race offspring as accursed and portray dark-skinned American Indians, for example, as “loathsome” and “an idle people full of mischief.”
Mormons believe that these passages are the word of God, as sacred as the Bible itself.
Good Mormons do not believe the ban on blacks was immoral, Brigham Young University religion professor Robert Millet said, adding, “It isn’t something we’re ashamed of. It isn’t something we feel was inappropriate.”
Mormons, Millet said, believe they were obeying God by barring blacks. Precisely why God wanted the church to discriminate is not clear, he said.
“We’re a forward-looking church, and we don’t look back around that period. We look forward,” Millet added.
Huckabee comment
Romney repeatedly has declined to discuss individual tenets of his Mormon faith, other than to say he believes Jesus is the Son of God and Savior of mankind.
And his opponents, for the most part, have declined to delve into Mormon theology.
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee apologized to Romney on Wednesday for asking a New York Times reporter if Mormons believe that Jesus and Satan were brothers, the Romney campaign reported.
The exchange came as Huckabee was being interviewed for a profile to appear in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. Reporter Zev Chafets had asked if Huckabee considered Mormonism a cult or a religion.
“I think it’s a religion,” Huckabee answered. “I really don’t know much about it.”
Chafets writes: “I was about to jot down this piece of boilerplate when Huckabee surprised me with a question of his own: ‘Don’t Mormons,’ he asked in an innocent voice, ‘believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?’”
On Wednesday, the Times posted the entire profile on its Web site. It’s available at
the paper's website.
During Wednesday’s debate with his Republican rivals, Huckabee appeared to refer to the flap, saying, “I’m going to be a lot more careful about everything I say, because I find that it gets amplified to a new level.”
Huckabee campaign manager Chip Saltsman denied that the former Arkansas governor was trying to disparage Romney’s faith.
In fact, the Mormon Church does teach that Jesus Christ is the elder brother of Satan, according to Kim Farah, the Latter-day Saints’ spokesman.
An article on the church’s Web site states that Satan chose to rebel against his Heavenly Father. Jesus, on the other hand, did his Father’s will.
But, critics said, it was inappropriate for Huckabee, a Southern Baptist minister, to draw attention to particular Mormon teachings.
“I don’t see how you can read that any other way, really, than an attempt to stir up a kind of religious bias, so yeah, I think it was inappropriate. I wish he hadn’t done it,” said Romney supporter and Republican Sen. Jim Talent of Missouri.
Talk-show host Jan Mickelson of WHO-AM in Des Moines says Huckabee undermined his own campaign by asking the question. “It is great talk-radio fodder. It is great political-junkie fodder. And it is devastatingly bad presidential politics,” Mickelson said. “It is not in the interest of political candidates to get their candidacy bogged down on Mormon doctrine — or Christian doctrine, for that matter.”
Mormon doctrine
A Romney campaign spokesman declined to say whether Romney believes it was moral for the church to discriminate against blacks before 1978. But she issued a written statement saying: “Governor Romney does not tolerate racial discrimination in any form. Indeed, Governor Romney is very proud that his father, George Romney, marched with Martin Luther King and fought to integrate public housing as US secretary of housing and urban development.”
Unlike some Christian denominations, the Mormon Church is not asking black Americans for forgiveness. “There’s been no formal apology,” said church spokesman Farah.
“The Gospel is for all people,” Farah said in a written statement. “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints declares that ‘all are alike unto God’ and that God invites ‘all to come unto him and partake of his goodness, and he denieth none that come unto him, black and white, bond and free, male and female.’”
When Mormon leaders announced that they’d received a revelation from God opening the priesthood to blacks, it “was a time of great rejoicing in the Church,” Farah added.
Church leaders now denounce racial bias as “an offense against God.”
The Mormon church was not an early champion of racial equality. Although Joseph Smith, who organized the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1830, allowed at least one black man to enter the priesthood, church teachings became less sympathetic toward blacks after the trek West. Prophet Brigham Young denounced abolitionists and allowed slavery in the Utah territory. He said that race-mixing should be punishable by death.
Today, Mormon missionaries travel the globe passing out scriptures that contend dark skin is — or at least was — a divine curse and that biracial children are — or were — accursed.
Baptist context
Mormon racial doctrines are “repugnant” and unscriptural, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette this week.
Bigotry “always has been a sin,” said the Rev. Frank Page, head of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination and a pastor in Taylors, S.C. “Any kind of ethnocentrism, any kind of racism, is contrary to the heart of God.”
The Southern Baptist Convention was founded in 1845 after a split among American Baptists over the issue of slavery. For a century after the Civil War, many of its congregations refused to allow blacks to attend, and many of its members fought to preserve segregation. During the Little Rock desegregation process, Baptist ministers took out newspaper ads denouncing integration and decrying interracial dating.
But in 1995, the convention voted to “unwaveringly denounce racism, in all its forms, as deplorable sin.”
Meeting in San Antonio, Southern Baptists also voted to apologize “to all African-Americans for condoning and/or perpetuating individual and systemic racism in our lifetime; and we genuinely repent of racism of which we have been guilty.”
Page says mainstream Christian movements reject claims that dark skin is or ever has been a divine curse. They also dismiss claims that biracial children are or ever were accursed. “I’m fairly good at church history, and I can tell you I know of no denomination [that] has ever held that position. ... Catholic — never. Protestant — never. Orthodox — never.”
The love of god
The Rev. Kenneth Hutcherson, a black pastor from Redmond, Wash., says the Gospel does not discriminate.
“The Bible is very clear. If you believe in your heart and confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus Christ, you shall be saved. ... There’s no limitations to color,” Hutcherson said. “The love of God is based upon not the color of the skin but the color of one’s heart.”
Jesse Miranda, founder of the National Alliance of Evangelical Ministries and an Assemblies of God presbyter, said that all people are made in the image of God and that racial bias is a sin.
In heaven, “gathered around the throne of God, there will be people of every tribe, every nation, every tongue and language,” Miranda said. “They will come from the east, from the west, from the north, from the south.”
Ostling, whose book, Mormon America: the Power and the Promise, has just been updated, says some Latter-day Saints would like to see the church apologize for its past treatment of blacks.
But don’t look for any statements of regret to be forthcoming, he suggested.
“The Mormon culture makes it very awkward to officially admit that the prophet and apostles of the past were in error. It seems to undercut the authority and the credibility of the church.”