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Prophesy or Prejudice?

"We believe that men will be punished for their own sins, and not for Adam's transgression."

LDS Second Article of Faith

"For instance, the descendants of Cain cannot cast off their skin of blackness, at once, and immediately, although every soul of them should repent,....Cain and his posterity must wear the mark which God put upon them; and his white friends may wash the race of Cain with fuller's soap every day, they cannot wash away God's mark."

John Taylor, Millenial Star Vol 14 pg 418

I don't think I am the first person to notice this disconnect in LDS doctrine. White folks are only punished for their own sins, but blacks and "Lamanites" are eternally marked and cursed because of the sins of their forebears. Blacks because of Cain and Ham, Lamanites because of Laman, Lemuel, and the other progenitors of that race in the Book of Mormon (2 Nephi 5:21, Alma 3: 6, 17:15) Blacks were excluded from the Priesthood from the Church's founding in 1830 until 1978, when Church President, Spencer W. Kimball received a "revelation" that the "long promised day has come" and the priesthood was extended to all worthy male members of the Church.

It doesn't take much of a historian to recognize that racism was rampant in the United States during the early years of the Church. Blacks were enslaved in the South, and the notion of white superiority was common in both North and South. A prejudice aganist Blacks during that time was so ingrained in American society that its absence would have been a remarkable difference between a new American religion and the rest of society. Such a difference would haven been consistent with the second Article of Faith, and with the bold concepts of the Declaration of Independance. It would have marked a true humility and repudiation of boastful conceits and arrogance of men.

But such a difference did not exist. The general prejudices of the times were embodied in the doctrine of the Church, and remained so for 148 years; justified by a particular interpretation of Genesis 4:15. But the "mark" of Cain was really set as a warning to any who would "slay" a descendant of Cain that vengeance would be seven fold and nowhere does it say the mark was of dark skin (Genesis 4:15).

Instead, Mormon doctrine teaches that Ham was somehow tainted by intermarrying with a descendant of Cain, such that Noah's curse on Caanan, (Genesis 9), one of Ham's sons (Genesis 10:6) was really an extension of the curse on Cain from Genesis 4, and not the result of Noah getting drunk and falling asleep in his nakedness (Genesis 9:21-24). And Caanan was only one of Ham's sons. What of the other three?

I raise this point to ask a simple question. Was the doctrine that barred people of color from the priesthood a reflection of divine revelation or was it simply a reflection of the prejudices that existed at the time the Church was founded, carried forward unexamined until the pressure of social change forced them to change?

If this doctrine was due to personal prejudices, what other doctrines are?


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