“You’re Mormon, right?” I was in eighth grade, and one of my classmates had approached me. “I heard Mormon Jesus hates black people. Is that true?” I assured him that this was not the case. For starters, there was no such thing as ‘Mormon Jesus.’ As a Mormon, I worshipped the same Jesus everyone else did. Regarding the specific claim, Mormonism does not teach that Jesus hates black people. He loves them just like he loves everyone else.
“Oh. I hear Mormons sacrifice goats. Is this true?” I assured him that this was also not true. I’d never heard of any connection between Mormonism and goat sacrifices and didn’t understand where this idea had originated. The most common question I got from people asking me about Mormonism was some form of “How many Moms do you have?” I didn’t like this question either, but at least understood where it came from. I would jokingly reply, “I have one, how many do you have?”
When I was a freshman in college, my roommate was black. For the first two months, I was still attending church, and he would notice me putting on a tie to leave on Sunday mornings. We talked a couple times about faith. He had been raised religious and was looking around to see if there were any local churches that interested him. He asked me about Mormonism, and I explained a little about how Mormonism distinguished itself from mainstream American Christianity. I told him I felt ambivalent about God, the Mormon Church, and my future churchgoing plans.
An unfailingly gregarious person, he ran into the two young women assigned to be Mormon missionaries on campus. He stopped to talk, told them he knew me, and picked up a couple of their handouts. Later he asked me some more questions. He mentioned that his sister didn’t like Mormonism because she said it was racist. Five years past middle school, I knew a little more. I told him that early Mormon leaders were racist. I explained that blacks had been banned from being ordained to the priesthood until 1978, when Mormon leaders changed their position to ease political pressure and enable growth in Latin America. I said I felt most members were well meaning, and I hadn’t noticed overt racism, but the Mormon church in America was still very much an organization of white people. The leadership was all white, most members were white, and culturally Mormonism was extremely white. I told him that if I hadn’t been brought up Mormon, I wouldn’t become one. Mormonism felt like a lot of baggage, and I wanted to opt out. I couldn’t understand why I should ask someone else to opt in.
When I saw the missionaries at Church on Sunday, they asked me about my roommate. I told them he had brought up Mormonism, and I’d answered some of his questions. I played it off as a brief discussion and didn’t go into detail about what I’d said. With typical overzealous positivity, the senior member of the pair exclaimed “Yay! High five for missionary work!” I didn’t want to do missionary work, and what I had done didn’t qualify. But I couldn’t explain this to her, so I smiled and gave her a high five. While I wasn’t honest with the missionaries, I had been honest with my roommate.
Though I didn’t know it in eighth grade, Mormon history is full of racism, from scripture to prophets to practices. Racist themes and language cascade through the Book of Mormon. This foundational scripture, held up as the “most correct of any book on earth,” tells the story of the patriarch Lehi, a Hebrew whose family migrates from Jerusalem to the Americas. He has a righteous son Nephi and a wicked son Laman. The book is largely the stories of their descendants. Alma 3 reads:
And the skins of the Lamanites were dark, according to the mark which was set upon their fathers, which was a curse upon them because of their transgression and their rebellion against their [brother Nephi… a] just and holy [man].
Throughout the book, the descendants of Laman are described as barbaric. The righteous, light-skinned Nephites eventually fall from grace, and the dark-skinned Lamanites wipe them out, ending the book. It was a longtime Mormon teaching that the remaining Lamanites were the ancestors of the dark-skinned Native American population.
Many early Mormon leaders taught that people with dark skin were less worthy, with Brigham Young being particularly adamant. In 1852, Young acted out this belief by instituting a ban on blacks being ordained to the priesthood.
Despite prior prophetic statements, and being a theme of the Book of Mormon, current leadership disavows the idea that dark skin is a divine curse upon wicked ancestors. In the age of DNA sequencing, the claim that Native Americans descend from the Hebrews has also been largely abandoned. The racism of early Mormon leaders is excused as a product of the times, the result of a religion founded in mid-nineteenth-century America.
Brigham Young’s priesthood ban lasted until 1978, through 126 years and nine subsequent prophets. It lasted through the nationwide abolition of slavery, a constitutional amendment guaranteeing citizenship regardless of race, Brown v. Board of Education, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. For a product of the times, it had incredible longevity.
Racism and discrimination in Mormonism are not problems of previous eras. They are current. A quick glance at the hues on the org chart confirms this.
During a visit to my Grandparents’ house in 2014, I was flipping through the scrapbooks in a closet. Most pages had pictures and newspaper clippings celebrating graduations, weddings, and babies. Part way through one book, I froze. There was a letter-to-the-editor, published in the San Jose Mercury News, written by my uncle. He was writing to express support for California’s proposed constitutional ban on gay marriage. He claimed same sex marriage would diminish traditional marriage, destabilize society, and result in more illegitimate children.
In June of 2008, the Mormon church released a statement to its California members asking them to support the November ballot initiative with time and money. Members responded enthusiastically, with Protect Marriage, the organization supporting the ban, estimating that Mormons provided nearly half of their funding and a majority of door-to-door canvassing. This wasn’t ancient history or the mistakes of previous generations. I remembered the events. The ban passed. This was real harm, done to real people, in my lifetime. And it was right in front of me, clearly preserved in scrapbook form, a part of my heritage.
The Mormon church has been dismissive of LGBT people for decades. Prophets and apostles have long maintained that being gay is not innate, but a perversion by which Satan tries to corrupt people. They insist that people are not gay, merely struggling with “same-sex attraction.” In a 1970 work, two apostles stated that “[God] did not make people ‘that way.’” They suggested that with enough prayer and effort, gay people "can move their romantic interests where they belong. [Straight] Marriage and normal life can follow.” At BYU, the Church-owned university in Utah, experiments were run on conversion therapy, inflicting great trauma on participants. A generation of gay people were pressured into mixed-orientation heterosexual marriages, to disastrous results. While both conversion therapy and encouraging gay people into heterosexual marriages are no longer practiced, the teaching that homosexuality is a perversion and LGBT people are merely struggling with “same-sex attraction” remains.
Through high school and into college, I remember hearing rumors that the Church was getting more progressive. Some local leaders tried to be supportive of LGBT members in their congregations. One friend reported that her local Elder’s Quorum President, the appointed leader of the Men’s organization, was openly gay. Near the outskirts of the faith, communities were trying to be more inclusive, even if this change wasn’t directed or sanctioned by leaders in Salt Lake City.
In November of 2015, any illusions of progress were washed away. Updates to the Church’s Handbook of Instructions were leaked online. This handbook directs local, lay leaders on administering the Church in a consistent manner. It organizes individual congregations into a globally coherent religion. Previously, while gay marriage was clearly forbidden under Church policy, individual bishops had a lot of leeway in deciding how to work with LGBT people in their communities who wanted to participate. The new policy left no room for doubt. In apparent response to the June 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage across the US, Mormon leaders declared that any members in civil gay marriages were guilty of apostasy.
Apostasy is one of the most grievous sins possible. Openly gay members would face excommunication: an expulsion from the membership and a ban on participation. Additionally, children living in households with gay parents would not be allowed to participate in ceremonies to formally name and bless babies. Children of gay parents would also be refused baptism at the customary age of 8. Such children could not be baptized until they turned 18 and disavowed the practice of gay marriage in front of a religious leader.
The message was unmistakable. The Mormon Church finds gay people unworthy of being associated with them. Additionally, gay people are so degenerate that they corrupt their children, who can’t affiliate with the Church until they are old enough to properly disown their parents.
For a Church that emphasizes that family bonds are paramount and eternal, excluding children and excommunicating parents are the toughest penalties possible. Telling LGBT Mormons that their families are illegitimate and cannot be welcomed into the Mormon community has caused and continues to cause a lot of anguish. The Mormon Church has gone out of its way to stake out positions on LGBT issues at odds with both scientific consensus and increasing public acceptance. It took Church policy years to catch up with the rest of the country during the civil rights era, and it looks like it could take leaders years to catch up with the rest of the country again. In the meantime, they keep doing real harm to living, contemporary people.
For me, Mormonism is not simply skeletons in the closet. It is a practice of real, ongoing damage. This is a part of my heritage, but I don’t want it to be part of my legacy.
“I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.” – Maya Angelou
Mormonism is, without a doubt, the reason I exist. It’s the reason my parents, grandparents, and great grandparents met. It has shaped the most important life choices of my people for generations. When I took an DNA test, I matched so many people whose ancestors who moved from Northern Europe to Utah in the mid-19th century that it flagged “Mountain West Mormon Pioneers” as a migration in my past. Mormonism is literally in my DNA.
It’s hard to accept that something so integral to shaping my personal history might not be making the world a better place. I’ve struggled to uncouple the legitimacy of Mormonism from my own legitimacy as a person. If I feel the world would be better off without Mormonism, would it be better off without me? Part of me feels disloyal for turning my back on my heritage. What becomes of filial obligations if I disagree with the family narrative apparently understood by everyone else? Without Mormonism, it is hard to form a tidy personal narrative with purpose and direction. My existence is an accident, caused by a series of decisions I view to be mistakes. My future feels unmoored from my past.
Heritage is the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, and where we came from. It’s hard to be critical of a heritage without those it belongs to feeling like their personal legitimacy and understanding of their identity is being challenged. Differentiating the self from one’s heritage is uncomfortable, but necessary for change. Mormonism, a central part of my personal heritage, passes down traditions including racism and homophobia. While there has been undeniable progress since the 1800s, these and other issues persist. Without acknowledging problems as current, how will they ever be fixed?
Partway through my freshman year of college, I learned that my roommate had a boyfriend. He didn’t tell me himself; I learned from a mutual friend. In that moment, I felt huge waves of both relief and sadness. I was very glad that I had not recommended Mormonism to him earlier in the year. Mormonism’s great plan of happiness did not include him. Even though he would have never joined, and we both knew I hadn’t attended for months, I felt tainted by proximity to the ideology. For my roommate’s sake – as well as my own – I was grateful for the distance I had managed to establish.
I also felt sad that he hadn’t told me himself, though I’d seen him with his boyfriend several times. The distance I had established was not enough. My heritage was seeping into my post-Mormon life, impairing real, current relationships.
I’d hoped that if I left Mormonism alone, it would leave me alone. But that’s the thing about a heritage: it’s pervasive. To stop passing it on requires deliberate and ongoing intervention. I want values and ideals that I can share with pride instead of guilt or shame. I hope to know better and to do better. I want a legacy that is better than my heritage.
"Never Come Back Again," Austin Plaine
