Reconciling the Past: The Black Mormon Dilemma
mormon need to boost their numbers. but, what about that whole “curse of Ham” thing?
2007-07-26
Ken Parrish Perkins

When Noah Morris began conversing with the friendly missionaries camped patiently outside his family’s home in Nigeria he knew nothing of a dreaded skin-color curse. Nor was he aware that at one point black men couldn’t obtain full-fledged membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of  Latter-day Saints (LDS) and had to shelve any notions of ascending its spiritual hierarchy.
For the missionaries it was apparently don’t ask, don’t tell.

By the time Morris, now 28, had come to the United States, first living in Houston and later enrolling at Brigham Young University, he was knee-deep in a quandary: how to reconcile a church’s checkered past on race?

Morris considered himself a faithful Mormon then and still does as a third year political science major with sights on law school.

But even now as he roams the BYU campus,  surrounded by the largest concentration of Mormons and, for that matter, white Americans anywhere, what often eats at him psychologically is the lingering notion that past church leaders were, well, racist.

“I’m someone who has always tried to say what’s on my mind, how I really feel,” says Morris, who is president of BYU’s Black Student Union.  “So I always let people know in the church here that I don’t agree with whatever their teaching was with blacks. It’s erroneous and couldn’t possibly come from the person we all claim to call God.”

Nothing sums up the church’s own quandary better than that. Repudiating old doctrines and statements without undermining the faith of believers is the dilemma the church finds itself in, and it cuts deeper: what of the credibility of previous church figures, like Brigham Young himself, whom Mormons revere as prophets inspired by God?

There’s general agreement among independent religion scholars that after the death of LDS founder Joseph Smith Jr. in 1944, the church’s liberal views on race, such as the ban, changed under Young.

“The fact remains that the LDS Church has an image issue with the larger body of North American blacks,” says Darron T. Smith, a Mormon scholar and co-editor with Newell G. Bringhurst of the book Black and Mormon. “The negative history of blacks in the LDS faith will not go away until the church forthrightly confronts its past and stops pretending that it didn’t exist and engage members of the black community within the organization.”

For most white members of the 177-year-old church which counts among its members 12 million worldwide, half of that in the U.S., (its most famous black member is singer Gladys Knight) the status of black Mormons was resolved on June 8, 1978 with a four-paragraph statement from then LDS President Spencer Kimball that said, in part, “every faithful, worthy man in the Church may receive the holy priesthood.”

It was a bold about-face: was the church disavowing its teachings about the skin color curse next? This long-held belief had been recounted in Mormon Scripture. Africans were descendants of the biblical personages Cain and Ham who displeased God and were cursed.

While many white denominations have used this same curse-of-Ham mythology to justify racist attitudes, particularly during American slavery, it’s something that for whatever reason didn’t dissolve within the LDS church.

This Cain linkage is what so distresses African American Mormons because it places their spiritual lineage in direct correlation with the alleged descendants of a man who has, as one Mormon scholar put it, “come to symbolize evil on the same level as Lucifer himself.”

Then there’s the issue of what really prompted the church’s 1978 epiphany. LDS’s official line was merely righting wrongs. Scholars Smith and Bringhurst fingered the church’s need for international expansion.

Mormon outreach in populous black areas was nonexistent until the ban was lifted. Since then the church has grown significantly in Africa and Brazil, two of the world’s most populous black continents. In Africa, Mormon membership has ballooned from 12,000 to around 180,000 in the last decade.

Missionaries are turning up more in black communities despite their presence being so understandably problematic.

“I wouldn’t say it’s hostile in any way,” Benjamin Stearns, a 20-year-old black Mormon who was canvassing a black neighborhood in Dallas says of his welcome. “People are generally nice. Sometimes they’d rather not talk, though.”

“I don’t trust them,” said Bernard Gentry, a 38-year-old mechanic who was approached by Sterns and his partner, a white Mormon named Jeffrey Towns. “I’m not much of a churchgoer but if I do go, I ain’t going there.”

 Smith, the scholar, joined the church as a teen in 1980, drawn in by its family atmosphere and teachings on the afterlife. He found church members welcoming until he began to criticize the church's previous attitudes toward blacks. White Mormons would often bring up old teachings to justify the onetime ban on black priests.

A PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Utah, Smith says black Mormons reconcile their feelings for the church’s past by separating then from now.

There’s something else, too. “Many blacks that convert to Mormonism tend to be fairly middle class and are use to being around white folks,” Smith says. “These types of black Americans are what I would coin `socially white.’ They look like me but have many of the white sensibilities as their white counterparts. The sensibilities to which I refer would be notions of individualism, colorblindness, universalism, meritocracy and many of  the tenets of Western culture.”

That sort of assimilation might be high but there’s apparently still a need for a separate black Mormon entity. The Genesis Group began in 1971 as a support group but also, as its website states, to prove how “misinformation and myths” are often spread about the LDS faith.

Members write emotional testimonies about how the racial messiness of the church’s past fails to override the appeal of teachings that “make us better human beings and better family members. And the African American community needs that salvation.”

Smith isn’t buying any of it. “(The Church) needs to stop spreading pernicious rumors, innuendos, folklore about our black brothers and sisters as being cursed,” he says. “This is not productive in our efforts to proselytize blacks and to retain blacks in the church.”

(Ken Parrish Perkins is a television writer who occasionally ditches his prime-time preoccupation for higher order thinking.)