Mormonism and native americans

This is the third in a series of articles on this blog on mormons and race for the first two see http://blog.circlealpha.com/?p=22#more-22 and http://blog.circlealpha.com/?p=28. Also, if you want something a bit more”scholarly” I’d highly recomend the report compiled by the Kenyan Government some years back, which is now available online courtesey of the Institute for Religious Research, entitled “Skin Color and the LDS Church”.

This article, however, is going to be a bit more focused then my previous two and not look at my personal experiences in the church and focus instead on the phenomenal doctrine that if they convert to Mormonism and are Righteous, Native Americans will become White.

To start with we have the assertion made by the LDS church from 1830 – Present that the ancestors of ALL native Americans, north and south, were the “Lamanites”, a nation of apostates descended from Hebrew refugees who ended up in the Americas. New DNA evidence, interestingly enough, proves that this statement is a crock of horsehit (to put it nicely) , but some Mormons have attempted to explain the DNA evidence away by hypothesizing that the Lamanites were absorbed into a larger population that came over the landbridge. This argument, however, has no basis at all in scripture and is actually explicitly contradicted not only by the book of Mormon itself but by the statements of church officials over the last 170 years. The Mormon Curtain has an excellent article on the topic that breaks it down in deatail, which I won’t attempt to replicate here.

[youtube svfxSscxh8o DNA Evidence vs. Mormonism - Hard proof that the Book of Mormon is a work of fiction]
I love this flick, everything except the last 3 minutes where some Christian pastor comes on and makes a sales pitch to try to win mormon converts.

In any case, the introduction to the book of Mormon in the freecopies available from every Mormon missionary out trying to win converts today says that the Lamanites are “the principal ancestors of the American Indians.” Far be it from me to argue with scripture, so we’ll take them at their word despite the overwhelming evidence against it.

So, having accepted that Native Americans are the descendants of ancient Hebrew refugees, we might start out by learning a bit about what type of people these folks were and how did they end up with dark skin if they’re descended from Hebrews? The answer is to be found, again, in the scriptures.

[20] Wherefore, the word of the Lord was fulfilled which he spake unto me, saying that: Inasmuch as they will not hearken unto thy words they shall be cut off from the presence of the Lord. And behold, they were cut off from his presence.
[21] And he had caused the cursing to come upon them, yea, even a sore cursing, because of their iniquity. For behold, they had hardened their hearts against him, that they had become like unto a flint; wherefore, as they were white, and exceedingly fair and delightsome, that they might not be enticing unto my people the Lord God did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them.
[22] And thus saith the Lord God: I will cause that they shall be loathsome unto thy people, save they shall repent of their iniquities.
[23] And cursed shall be the seed of him that mixeth with their seed; for they shall be cursed even with the same cursing. And the Lord spake it, and it was done.
[24] And because of their cursing which was upon them they did become an idle people, full of mischief and subtlety, and did seek in the wilderness for beasts of prey.
Second Nephi, Ch. 5, verses 20-24.

Notice the caveat in verse 22, “save they shall repent of their iniquities”, implying that if they do repent of their “iniquities” (and what sort of iniquities, I wonder, could possibly be encoded in someone’s skin color?!) the Lamanites and their Descendants will become White again! Now that’s quite a claim, isn’t it? Because now all of a sudden skin color isn’t just something you inherit from your ancestors who may or may not have been cursed but becomes an accurate barometer of ones own righteousness! Now, lest I be accused of putting words into other mens mouths, Joseph Smith said much the same thing:

For instance, the descendants of Cain cannot cast off their skin of blackness, at once, and immediately, although every soul of them should repent, obey the Gospel, and do right from this day forward. . . . Cain and his posterity must wear the mark, which God put upon them; and his white friends may wash the race of Cain with fuller’s soap every day, they cannot wash away God’s mark; The Lamanites, through transgression, became a loathsome, ignorant and filthy people, and were cursed with a skin of darkness … yet, they have the promise, if they will believe, and work righteousness, that not many generations shall pass away before they shall become a white and delightsome people; but it will take some time to accomplish this at best”
The Latter-Day Saints Millennial Star, vol. 14, p. 418

That doctrine has been echoed consistently ever since. Spencer W. Kimball – the man who would later become a “Prophet” and deliver the “revelation” that black people were to (finally) be allowed to hold the priesthood in 1978 – was one of many mormons who took up the refrain. After visiting a mission site in South America, he said in his General Conference Report of October, 1960, which was published in Improvement Era, December 1960, pp 922-923:

I saw a striking contrast in the progress of the Indian people today…. The day of the Lamanites is nigh. For years they have been growing delightsome, and they are now becoming white and delightsome, as they were promised. In this picture of the twenty Lamanite missionaries, fifteen of the twenty were as light as Anglos, five were darker but equally delightsome The children in the home placement program in Utah are often lighter than their brothers and sisters in the hogans on the reservation.

At one meeting a father and mother and their sixteen-year-old daughter were present, the little member girl–sixteen–sitting between the dark father and mother, and it was evident she was several shades lighter than her parents–on the same reservation, in the same hogan, subject to the same sun and wind and weather….These young members of the Church are changing to whiteness and to delightsomeness. One white elder jokingly said that he and his companion were donating blood regularly to the hospital in the hope that the process might be accelerated.

Native Americans, of course, tend to have a rather less positive recollection of”the home placement program in Utah”, a State-sanctioned program that kidnapped thousands of indigenous youth and placed them in the homes of good responsible white Christians ( in Utah that meant Mormons mostly) in order to prevent native cultures from being passed on from parents to children and speed up the assimilation process. The UN defines such practices as Cultural Genocide – the destruction of a people’s culture without actually killing the individuals – and such programs are not considered politically correct today. Kimball, however, saw the process as positive because he thought it would make the kids whiter physically as well as culturally, and of course whiteness is a Good Thing. The word “racist” isn’t strong enough to describe such a man. In fact I can’t think of any word in the English language with enough venom, bile, and disgust to accurately describe him or the belief system he – and millions of other Mormons – have worked so hard to promote for almost two centuries now.

None – I repeat NONE – of this has ever been repudiated, denied, disclaimed, apologized for, or otherwise explained by any church official, meaning that as of right now in 2007 this is all still official and explicit church doctrine. The closest they’ve ever come is changing the word “white” to “pure” in 2 Nephi 30:6, where this same false prophecy is repeated, and then having the gall to pretend that that was the “original” wording and not even admit that they’re making a change! Still, changing one word in 2 Nephi 30:6 doesn’t do anything to even touch the wording in the verses I cited and certainly can’t erase the fact that the founder of the mormon religion was explicit in spelling out exactly what this “prophecy” meant. No mormon, of course, would dare to contradict Joseph Smith, any more then a Muslim would dare to contradict Muhammad, so we have no choice but to postulate that if Joseph Smith was actually a prophet and the mormon church is true then the racial policies he explicitly laid out go hand in hand with it. Since those policies have never been recanted or altered by any subsequent “Prophet” of the mormon faith, they are current doctrine.

If we were to take those racial doctrines as the Truth it would mean that every dark-skinned person with Native American ancestry – including as Kimball made clear the vast majority of Latinos / Chicanos – is cursed, loathsome, filthy, and (since they obviously aren’t white yet) wicked. Defend or denounce, the choice is yours, but no Mormon has any reasonable grounds for simply denying that this doctrine exists and ignoring it. Now why doesn’t somebody ask Mitt Romney about THAT on the campaign trail?

Given the Republican Party’s attempts to court “Family Values” Latinos, I can’t help but wonder why this isn’t an issue? They’re certainly not showing any respect for the Latino vote for throwing so much time, energy, and money behind a man who belongs to a church that embraces such doctrines! Unless of course the Republicans don’t really give a shit about Latinos except to the degree that they can be duped into voting alongside white conservative Christians because of their presumed common bigotry against gay folks.

And finally, one last gem from 1954 that I just found on why according to the Mormon racial doctrines racial segregation is a good and natural thing:

“Let us consider the great mercy of God for a moment. A Chinese, born in China with a dark skin, and with all the handicaps of that race seen’s to have little opportunity. But think of the mercy of God to Chinese people who are willing to accept the gospel. In spite of whatever they might have done in the pre-existence to justify being born over there as Chinamen, if they now, in this life, accept the gospel and live it the rest of their lives they can have the Priesthood, go to the temple and receive endowments and sealings, aud that means they can have exaltation. Isn’t the mercy of God marvelous?

“Think of the Negro, cursed as to the Priesthood…. This negro, who, in the pre-existence lived the type of life which justified the Lord in sending him to the earth in the lineage of Cain with a black skin, and possibly being born in darkest Africa–if that negro is willing when he hears the gospel to accept it, he may have many of the blessings of the gospel. In spite of all he did in the pre-existent life, the Lord is willing, if the Negro accepts the gospel with real, sincere faith, and is really converted, to give him the blessings of baptism and the gift of the Holy Ghost. If that Negro is faithful all his days, he can and will enter the celestial kingdom. He will go there as a servant, but he will get celestial glory….

“Now let’s talk segregation again for a few moments…. When the Lord chose the nations to which the spirits were to come, determining that some would be Japanese and some would be Chinese and some Negroes and some Americans, He engaged in an act of segregation….

“Who placed the Negroes originally in darkest Africa? Was it some man, or was it God? And when He placed them there, He segregated them…. At least in the cases of the Lamanites and the Negroes we have the definite word of the Lord Himself that He placed a dark skin upon them as a curse… He forbade intermarriage… He certainly segregated the descendants of Cain when He cursed the Negro as to the Priesthood, and drew an absolute line. You may even say He dropped an iron curtain there….

“We must not intermarry with the Negro, Why? If I were to marry a Negro woman and have children by her, my children would all be cursed as to the Priesthood. Do I want my children cursed as to the priesthood? If there is one drop of Negro blood in my children, as I have read to you, they receive the curse. There isn’t any argument, therefore, as to inter-marriage with the Negro, is there? There are 50 million Negroes in the United States. If they were to achieve complete absorption with the white race, think what that would do. With 50 million Negroes intermarried with us, where would the Priesthood be? Who could hold it, in all America? Think what that would do to the work of the Church!

“Now we are generous with the negro [sic]…. I would be willing to let every Negro drive a cadillac if they could afford it. I would be willing that they have all the advantages they can get out of life in the world. But let them enjoy these things among themselves. I think the Lord segregated the Negro and who is man to change that segregation?… what God hath separated, let not man bring together again.”
Race Problems–As They Affect The Church, Address by Apostle Mark L. Petersen at the Convention of Teachers of Religion on the College Level, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, August 27, 1954

And no, the fake ’78 “revelation” that said Black people could hold the priesthood in doesn’t even begin to erase this sort of doctrine, go back and read it again and it’s obvious that he’s talking about a lot more then just black folks and whether they can be a priests in the Mormon church or not. If you believe this is the word of god then you’re a racist. If you do not believe this is the word of God then you can’t be a Mormon, period, end of story. Deal with It. And if you oppose explicit racism of this kind and think Jim Crow style segregation was a bad thing, you’ve got to oppose the Mormon church and it’s attempt to mainstream itself without explicitly renouncing and apologizing for all the filth and hatred it has spread.

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and a little bonus that’s not worth creating a new post for:

[youtube zy0d1HbItOo nolink]

Posted: August 18th, 2007 under gods & religion, race & racism.
Comments: none