Keeping up this Herculean task was difficult. And in South Africa and Brazil where intermarriages were common, the Church stringently tried to determine who was non-African by looking at appearances. The Church was trying to grow globally with Africa in mind while it wrestled with the scorn the civil rights struggle directed its way in the U.S.Īt first, the Church did not know what to make of interest from numerous people in Nigeria. “In the years that followed, other Mormon leaders offered other explanations for the restriction.”īut a hundred or so years after the death of Young was a much different time. “Young seems to have believed that barring black men from the priesthood and both black men and women from the ritual of sealing would prevent racial intermarriage in the church,” wrote Bowman This justification operates in the same vein as the Hamitic hypothesis, the idea that Africans are descendants of the cursed son of Noah, Ham.īut writing for, an American professor of History, Matthew Bowman, believes Young’s motivation was not only mystical but was also a phobia of black people. ![]() Western theologians who aimed to justify slavery theorized that black people were descendants of Cain. The Curse of Cain is in reference to the punishment God placed on Cain, brother of Abel, in the Book of Genesis. Young was a firm believer in the myth of the Curse of Cain. This was the period that the second president of the LDS, Brigham Young, presided over the affairs of the Church. Utah, the mecca of Mormons, has been a slave state that was forced to deal with the new significance black people had attained after 1865. Their requests to be made full members of the Church were denied.įor the Church, the enameling of its stance on the issue of black people kicked off after the American Civil War that made slavery illegal. ![]() Abel was even consecrated into the priesthood.īut neither of the two people was “sealed” in a Mormon temple. Jane Manning James and her counterpart, Elijah Abel, are in recorded history as black members of the LDS sometime in the 1800s. Black people were, therefore, “condemned” to the lowest significance even in death.īut the Church’s anti-black theology did not prevent some black people from joining for whatever reason. This was going to heaven, the lowest level in heaven.īut the theology also taught that if one was not “sealed” in a Church temple, one could not enjoy the benefits of the higher heavens. ![]() ![]() The lot black people had, according to Church theology, was already something that the theology afforded to all. What both of these stipulations meant was that black people could neither be leaders nor integral members of the LDS community. People of African descent were also excluded from temple worship or ordinances except for the baptism for the dead, a vicarious baptism on behalf of dead people. But if the secrets of the Book of Mormon was supposed to be for the good of all people, black people were not quite what LDS intended.Īccording to the theology of the Church before 1978, black people were welcomed but could not join the priesthood, a male-only hierarchy among the principles of becoming a dyed-in-the-wool Latter-Day Saint man.
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