And so it begins.
Yesterday, a group of black pastors led by Rev. O’Neal Dozier issued a press release calling on Mitt Romney to “renounce his racist religion.” They’ll be holding a news conference on Monday morning to try and purge Mitt of his Mormonism in order to “foster and maintain good race relations here in America.”
Swell.
Their press release, unfortunately, is riddled with massive factual and contextual errors that make them look more than a little ridiculous. Indeed, they begin with the bald assertion that “the Mormon religion is prejudiced against Blacks, Jews and the Native American Indians.” Well, no, it isn’t. To quote the Church’s most recent statement on the subject, “[t]he Church’s position is clear—we believe all people are God’s children and are equal in His eyes and in the Church. We do not tolerate racism in any form.”
That’s the official word from the Church they’re maligning. When slandering an entire faith, it might be a good idea to see what your target is saying before you put words in their mouth.
Still, even if they had spent the three minutes necessary to review the Church’s current position, it’s unlikely they’d be persuaded. That’s because they base their erroneous conclusion on statements of Brigham Young, “The Mormon Prophet,” in the “(Mormon) Journal of Discourses” and on a tortured misreading of the Book of Mormon.
I’ve said quite a bit about Brigham Young on this subject, and I think he was a great man called to a great work. I also think that, on the subject of race, that he was dead wrong and pretty much full of beans. The Church’s most recent statement says that “[w]e condemn racism, including any and all past racism by individuals both inside and outside the Church.” Far as I can tell, that includes Brigham Young.
People who want to cite Brigham as the infallible authority on race are ascribing a doctrine of infallibility to LDS leaders that we do not profess, although I do think people within the Church are as guilty of making that mistake as anyone else. Many of the warped explanations for racism within the Church come from later leaders who looked at Brigham’s mistaken, typical-19th-Century racist statements and tried to make sense out of them instead of having the courage to say “when it comes to race, the guy was just full of beans.”
We are repeatedly told in the Church that our leaders are not perfect, yet we respect them; we honor them, and we want to think the best of them. So in their well-intentioned eagerness to be supportive, some church members – a distinct minority, yes, but still too many – listen to people in high leadership positions and unquestioningly believe that every word that falls from their lips is the word of God. Both Joseph Smith and Brigham Young counseled against this notion repeatedly, with Joseph claiming “a prophet is a prophet only when he is acting as such,” and Brigham himself going even further:
I am… afraid that this people have so much confidence in their leaders that they will not inquire for themselves of God whether they are led by him… I am fearful they settle down in a state of blind self-security, trusting their eternal destiny in the hands of their leaders with a reckless confidence that in itself would thwart the purposes of God in their salvation, and weaken the influence they could give to their leaders, did they know for themselves, by the revelations of Jesus, that they are led in the right way. Let every man and woman know, themselves, whether their leaders are walking in the path the Lord dictates, or not. This has been my exhortation continually.
Good advice. It’s also advice that would lead an honest truth seeker to recognize that Brigham, when expounding based on his own limited racial understanding, wasn’t speaking for the Lord.
So how do we know, without a doubt, that a prophet is acting as such and speaking directly for God?
My personal answer is that his revelation is presented to the Church as revelation, sustained as revelation, and canonized as such and included in the Scriptures. The last time that happened was in 1978, when the lingering effects of Brigham’s racial mistakes were wiped away. (Incidentally, one such revelation to Brigham Young exists in LDS scriptures – D&C 136, which makes absolutely no mention of race.) That does not mean that, on other occasions, Brigham was uninspired or unworthy of our attention, and, indeed, he has a whole host of valuable sermons on other subjects in which his critics have no interest. It simply means that the 21st Century LDS Church has categorically rejected Brigham’s ruminations on race, whether it concern blacks or Jews or Klingons, and to cite them in order to claim that they represent the Church’s current position is either mistaken or dishonest.
The same thing, however, cannot be said of the Book of Mormon.
We continue to rely on that book as “the keystone of our religion,” and the clergymen calling on Mitt to walk away from his racist faith use the Book of Mormon as their star witness. They would have a much more compelling case, however, if they weren’t completely ignoring what the Book of Mormon actually says.
Consider their first Book of Mormon-related salvo near the top of the release:
“The Book of Mormon in 2nd Nephi, Chapters 5:21-23 accuses God of cursing African people and causing them to have black skin in order for them not to be attractive to white people.”
No, it doesn’t. There isn’t a single person of African descent mentioned in the Book of Mormon, nor has any verse in the Book of Mormon ever been used by anyone in the Church to justify exclusionary policies concerning African people.
2 Nephi 5 does talk about a “skin of blackness” that separates two factions of a group of displaced Israelites, not Africans. The people with that “skin of blackness” are referred to as Lamanites, and, at various times, they’re the most righteous people in the Book of Mormon. The most prominent prophet before the coming of Christ is Samuel the Lamanite, a man with dark skin who risks his life to rebuke the less righteous, lighter-skinned Nephites, who are repeatedly counseled to eschew racism. “Wherefore, a commandment I give unto you, which is the word of God, that ye revile no more against [the Lamanites] because of the darkness of their skins.” (Book of Mormon, Jacob 3:9)
The Book of Mormon becomes even more racially complex when one considers that racial distinctions vanish entirely after the coming of Christ, and intermarriage between the two groups becomes commonplace. For over 200 years among these people, “[t]here were no robbers, nor murderers, neither were there Lamanites, nor any manner of -ites; but they were in one, the children of Christ, and heirs to the kingdom of God.” (Book of Mormon, 4 Nephi 1:17)
Later, a group of people break away and call themselves Lamanites, but this becomes a cultural distinction, not a racial one. By the end of the book, all the Nephites are wiped out and only the Lamanites remain, and we are never told what color their skin was. The Church has always considered Lamanites to be ancestors of current Native Americans, members of the House of Israel, and heirs to a glorious destiny. The Church has never denied them any privilege or position, and the verses cited by Dozier have no bearing on how people of African descent have been treated.
Yet further in the press release, Dozier and Co. say this:
Also, according to Mormon Doctrine, Native American Indians were also of the class of the cursed because their skin was also a darker color.
How goofy is this? It’s as if the references in the Book of Mormon, which apply exclusively to Native Americans, were simply referring to them as some kind of afterthought to the cursed Africans, when, in fact, there’s no reference to Africans at all.
It then goes on to excoriate the practice of baptism for the dead which, apparently, is somehow racist, too, for reasons I don’t fully understand. I’ve yacked enough on that subject that I don’t feel the need to address it again here.
There are other minor details in the press release that are sloppy and irresponsible, such as when they say the Church claims “the Book of Mormon is ‘the most correct book, even more correct than the Bible.'” They put the last half of the sentence in quotes as if someone actually said those exact words, when they didn’t. They capitalize random words inappropriately, like the “the” in The Mormon Prophet. They thus refer to Mormon Doctrine, which is confusing, since there is a non-canonical book by Bruce R. McConkie titled Mormon Doctrine, and it’s unclear whether they’re trying to cite the book as a reference or if they’re just talking about Mormon doctrine in general and trying to make their mistaken interpretation of our doctrines look spookier.
None of that matters, I suppose. The bottom line is that they are deliberately distorting what Mormons believe in order to sow division and gain political advantage. I don’t like it when Republicans try that with President Obama, and I don’t think intellectually honest people of any political stripe should be willing to stand idly by and watch the same garbage being dumped on Mitt Romney.
The bigots here are the ones who are calling on Mitt Romney to renounce his faith in order to maintain “good race relations” with people who choose to willfully remain ignorant.
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