The Racist American Context the Church was Born Into 

Well done, gentlemen! I look forward to the rest of this series. We have to stop burying our heads in the sand and bring things into the open with no hard feelings on any front. God bless!

I am 74 years old. In my experience as a son of a Japanese convert mother, there were simply many Church members with racial resentments up into the 1950s and 1960s, but the Church did not focus on teaching them to overcome those prejudices. Instead, it invested in missionary efforts to recruit minority members from many lands, building the Church College of Hawaii, Church schools in Polynesia, and temples in Hawaii and New Zealand. In 1970 the Church built a visitor center at the World's Fair in Osaka, filming a Japanese version of the Man's Search for Happiness film and publishing a popular book about the Church in Japanese. President Kimball received the revelation on priesthood in 1978, and also announced construction of the Tokyo Temple, completed in 1980. The Church actively worked to overcome anger toward Japanese that was felt by many Americans owing to World War II, hatred that was promoted by President Roosevelt, who illegally punished Americans of Japanese ancestry because the US could not effectively attack Japan in the months after Pearl Harbor. Japanese Americans who lived in Utah were not imprisoned, and many of them had joined the Church, with the encouragement of Senator Thomas of Utah who had been a missionary in Japan in the 1920s. Utah Nisei were the core of the Japanese American Citizens League during the war. By 1978, the vast majority of LDS were yearning for an end to the priesthood restriction, and the most racist were dead. As a ward missionary in Colorado in 1974, I helped teach Charles, a black US paratrooper who joined the Church. In 1978, he was in Georgia and received the priesthood. He told me that he had spent months visiting churches in Colorado Springs, a hotbed of Evangelical organizations, but the first place he felt welcomed was our church. Thousands in Ghana and Nigeria had been converted by the Book of Mormon. Hundreds of black members in Brazil supported the new Sao Paolo Temple. Some critical threshold of yearning and charity was reached, that we were ready for the change.

Thanks for delivering this difficult information with sensitivity. I appreciate learning the cultural viewpoints that existed long before the Church was restored.

So glad to have found this channel

I love the context and perspective that this podcast provides. Balanced, researched, enlightening. Agreed we should not whitewash the past. Joseph Smith was told during the First Vision that "all their creeds were an abomination in his sight; all their professors were corrupt".... I think Joseph really understood that the restoration would go directly against much of the existing, prevailing belief and culture - which may be why Joseph was willing to ordain black men to the priesthood. To your point - being baptized does not automatically eliminate all baggage a person brings into the church from their past..... which is why prophets can "see around corners"

_THIS_ is crux, key, in explaining the _Why_ of the priesthood ban. Finally, someone finds it, lights it up, holds it up as the true view, the *_cause_* of the pause for blacks. Brother Darius Gray named that bitter experience _a calling._ Brothers, thanks monstrously much for this series-and especially this incisive mother lode episode. Our birthing church barely survived as it was; bannering its love and acceptance of blacks in those early years might have been its death knell. I believe blacks are God’s people; what other group has had to pass through such awfulness during and long after the atrocity of slavery? I was on my 2-year mission in the Louisiana-Baton Rouge Mission in 1978 when the ban was banished. We felt Heaven had come down and kissed the earth and ended a nightmare. At the time, our best and brightest investigators were all black. 🙏🏾 🖤

The first missionaries to Polynesian peoples went out in 1844. The first missionaries to American Indians went out in 1830, based in belief that they were members of Israel through descent from the Lehites and Mulekites. The first missionaries to Asia got to Japan in 1901 and he created a Japanese mission in Hawaii in the 1930s. Traditional American racists looked down on not only Africans but also Amerinds, Mexicans, Polynesians, and Asians. Yet the Church actively sought to recruit people from all these other ethnicities, dating back to the 1830s, 1840s, and 1900s. The Laie community demonstrates this, going back more than a century ago.

The earliest Church members from New England, New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio came from states where slavery was prohibited, and had little contact with slaves or slavemasters, until they arrived in Missouri, a state that had been admitted to the Union in 1820 as a state allowing slavery, as part of a compromise admitting Maine as a Free state. Slavery was a well established part of the Missouri economy in 1831, and the dominant culture of the "white" citizens of Missouri was the Scots-Irish culture that honored anger over insults and violent duels and clan feuds, inherited from the Border Lands of northern England and Scotland. Paranoia and preemptive violence were how those original Missouri settlers dealt with any anxieties. They were not rich planters with many slaves, but resentment toward people different from themselves was applied to blacks and Mormons both. Illinois was a Free state, so did not have slave populations. Same with Iowa. What the Ch7rch did have was a number of converts from slave states, who took their slaves with them to Utah Territory. Congress did not authorize slavery in the territories won from Mexico. Resentment by the slave states fueled their rebellion in 1861. Legal slavery ended in 1865. There was no large population of slaves or blacks in Utah, and few of them joined the Church. Meanwhile the Saints baptized Indians and missionaries like George Q Cannon and Joseph F. Smith translated the Book of Mormon into Hawaiian and brought 5% of the native population into the Church. They created Laie as an LDS community, and announced in 1915 the first temple outside the CONUS would be there. The "racism" of the apostles was limited toward African Americans, but NOT directed toward Indians, dark-skinned Polynesians, Japanese, or Mexicans, making the LDS unusually liberal among their contemporaries. Recruiting blacks could only occur in the South, where whites already resented both blacks AND Mormons. If the LDS gathered blacks, they would find resentment by the racist white southerners. But in other cultural contexts, the LDS seemed to favor ethnic groups over Europeans, as among the Maori and in Hawaii.

God loves each of us 🤍

I think you've done a good job navigating this topic. I agree that it is speculation to assume that the Ham story and the reference to his seed being servants refers specifically to blacks. Servitude was normal for all races for most of world history. If it ends up being true, however, that Ham was the ancestor of the black race, it would not be without comparison in the scriptural record. God is sovereign and deals with His children as He sees fit. Sometimes that has included marking certain groups in specific ways throughout history for His purposes. As long as we submit to God, whatever His dealings with us might be, we will be okay. Submission and obedience to His word and His dealings is the key.

11:55 and that started in the 1700’s. It was not customary before then, and only became popular as slavery became popular.

If only we had a divine connection to show us the way.

Excellent

The priesthood ban on black Africans is one of the saddest and most disturbing action Brigham Young, and succeeding presidents of the church, took. Neither Joseph Smith nor Brigham Young received any revelation to ban the priesthood from any worthy male member, and plural marriage was greatly exaggerated and deformed by Brigham Young and others. Best to be completely honest and open on these two topics. Brigham Young was racist, as were many others in the early days of the church, and plural marriage was not performed and practiced as it should have, in many cases.

47:10 makes me wonder how many other assumptions we have carried with us. Literally other cultures have all had a male and female God figure. Makes sense to me that God would reach out to multiple people to help them. The knowledge and tradition gets corrupted over time which is why God has to keep reaching out so we can comprehend Him.

So The Lord God & His Son + a bunch of Apostles appear to Joseph & begin a new Dispensation & Nobody, Not One happens to mention , by the way,. “Treat Humans Equally”?

EVERYONE IS A PRODUCT OF THEIR TIMES. Stop rehashing the past this way. You have NO idea of the thoughts, actions and pressures that people where under!!!!’

“When slavery is mentioned, too many people automatically thing of whites enslaving blacks. That is not even one-tenth of the story of slavery, which existed on every inhabited continent.” The word “slave” derives from the word for some white people who were enslaved on a mass scale ~ the Slavs ~ for more centuries than blacks were enslaved in the Western Hemisphere. … Thomas Sowell

Shall I tell you the law of God in regard to the African race? If the white man who belongs to the chosen seed mixes his blood with the seed of Cain, the penalty, under the law of God, is death on the spot. This will always be so. - Brigham Young, March 8, 1863 Journal of Discourses, Volume 10, Discourse 25

26:39 and now that same narrative is played out in the youth as thinking of themselves as genderless

There are traditions of our fathers which are correct and traditions of our fathers which are incorrect. The lord guides us as individuals and groups line upon line precept upon precept. Even today converts/those born in the covenant do not automatically have all past false beliefs erased from there mind at baptism.

🤔

It is not the Church. It is the Mormon heresy.

When one says, "and at the same time," it is redundant to add the word "too". Makes you sound like a teenager or uneducated person.

Imo the only book we need to read on this race issue is the Book of Mormon. If it is true then that ends any arguments on any issue!!

Appreciated the attempt to put things into context, however there some aspect of this podcast that are disingenuous. If wish to explain this Read Moses 7:8,22….also Joseph Smith's revision of Genesis noted this account of the people of Canaan: Behold the people of Canaan, which are numerous, shall go forth in battle aray against the people of Shum, & shall slay them, that they shall be utterly destroyed. & the people of Canaan shall divide themselves in the land & the land shall be barren & unfruitful, & none other people shall dwell there but the people of Canaan. < > < 4 > for, behold, the Lord shall curse the land with much heat & < the > barrenness thereof shall go forth forever. < > & there was a blackness come upon all the children of canaan so that they were despised among all people. And then here’s our prophet that should know better, seer and revelator. President Brigham Young stated, "What is the mark [of Cain]? You will see it on the countenance of every African you ever did see" Personally, I think that the Pearl of Great Price should be publicly disavowed…and some other publications.

This was Brigham’s doctrine. So was polygamy. So was Adam- God and blood atonement. We haven’t had a true prophet since Joseph Smith.

Joseph Smith stated this confirming the true scriptural doctrine stated clearly in the books of Abraham and Moses: "The curse is not yet taken off the sons of Canaan, neither will it be until it is affected by as great a power as caused it to come." Now, will you still harden your apostate hearts and deny these truths?!?!?!?