Religion » Amid nationwide tensions, they see the LDS gospel as a cure for racism, but the issue rarely arises at services. (Click here to play in YouTube)
A year after the LDS Church published a landmark essay about its past priesthood ban and amid a nationwide uproar over police shootings of African-Americans, many black Mormons yearn to discuss, debate and defuse racial tensions.
They do so in school, at work, on the Internet.
One place, it seems, they don’t come near the topic: in church.
And that, some say, needs to change.
“We have to use the gospel to fight against how blacks are treated in America and in the church,” says Kevin Mosley, a longtime black Mormon convert in Pittsburgh. “God expects it.”
For rank-and-file Mormons, though, conversations inside the church about race seem off-limits. Many members refuse to wade into that debate because it is so inescapably entwined with their faith’s own painful past, an embarrassing chapter that many feel is better left alone.
That’s where the groundbreaking essay comes in.
One year ago Tuesday, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints quietly acknowledged that its former prohibition on blacks entering the faith’s all-male priesthood resulted more from racism than revelation.
This recognition was posted on the faith’s official website in anessay titled “Race and the Priesthood,” which traces the ban from its 19th-century beginnings to its 1978 conclusion.
The policy apparently was not established by church founder Joseph Smith, who ordained several blacks to the priesthood, but came into being under his successor, Brigham Young, who was influenced by racial attitudes of the day.
None of the notions given to defend the exclusion came from deity or doctrine, the piece declares. “Church leaders today unequivocally condemn all racism, past and present, in any form.”
Black Mormons cheered the essay, and many hoped it would prompt wide-ranging and candid conversations among Latter-day Saints about their faith’s tortuous racial history.
That hasn’t happened.
Since the article’s release, however, seething tensions have erupted across the United States, triggered by the killing of an unarmed black man, Michael Brown, by a white cop in a St. Louis suburb. As other cases surfaced — including in Utah with the shooting of a biracial Darrien Hunt by two white Saratoga Springs police officers — many U.S. religious leaders have joined protests, expressing outrage and solidarity with black Americans.
The LDS essay captured headlines in major media outlets but made little splash inside the 15 million-member LDS Church.
That’s partly due to the way church leaders released it, along with a general reluctance inside the faith to tackle tough topics that might spur contention. Mormons tend to be conflict-averse.
“We can’t talk at church about Michael Brown and other unarmed black men being shot by police,” says Mosley, a retired Pennsylvania trooper, “because it’s so hard for members to talk about race at all.”
But Mosley and other Latter-day Saints see discussion of race — even when it is uncomfortable — as healthy.
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