First, indulge me while I pat myself on the back. This new record has been set in large part thanks to my page about Ezra Taft Benson's 1987 talk "To the Mothers in Zion," which a lot of people looked up to verify that the LDS Church's general Relief Society president, Camille Johnson, disregarded the prophet's counsel in the 1980s and is now being celebrated by the church for it. The gaslighting is rather tedious. I now return you to your regularly scheduled blog post. Twitter is now completely X, which is a really cool name if you're in middle school. I'll probably just keep calling it Twitter to show my contempt for its owner. It's a dumpster fire of bullying and hate speech, and it deserves to lose all its advertising sponsors, but I keep using it because I have the unfortunate moral failing of really enjoying heated arguments with bad people. I've had a few more civil debates with okay people, but they didn't give me the same thrill. I was going to share several of the stupid LDS-adjacent Tweets that I saw this week, but as this topic probably interests no one as much as me, it isn't worth the effort. I'll just share one. I was one of the first people who saw it, and I couldn't believe my eyes. I gladly helped make it go viral-ish. It's public knowledge that this man has a traumatic brain injury, and it's very obvious from his posts that he's delusional. I've tried to tell him that a few times. I know there's not a nice way to tell someone that they're delusional, but I tried not to be a jerk about it, and I hoped he could make the connection since he's aware that he has a traumatic brain injury. But no. Given the circumstances, I don't think he's guilty of the same intentional evil as most of his right-wing Mormon buddies, and I want to be sympathetic to him, but he's such an insufferable ass that it's impossible. Most Mormons are, of course, as shocked and horrified by this man's belief as I was. Even on Twitter, many decent Mormons told him he was wrong. (The horrible ones were strangely quiet.) He claimed that only apostates and "progmos" were telling him he was wrong, and he doubled down. So this is the nonsense of a mentally ill man who does not accurately represent what most Mormons believe. Nonetheless, I have no hesitation in using it to humiliate the LDS Church, because it is what the Book of Mormon teaches. It's what I was taught as a kid. It wasn't made into a big deal, and I didn't give it much thought, and I didn't realize how horrifically racist it is until I was in college - and then only because I stumbled, quite by accident, upon an article by Mormon apologists arguing that the skin color in the Book of Mormon is metaphorical. They presented a surprisingly sophisticated argument, and it persuaded me for several years. But it makes no sense in the obvious nineteenth-century cultural context of the book's origin, it isn't what Mormon leaders taught for most of their history, it isn't what was depicted in decades of visual media based on the Book of Mormon, and I'm pretty sure that even today it isn't a mainstream Mormon belief. I suspect that most Mormons, like me, honestly just don't think about this part of the book very much. I bet a substantial number of them don't even know about it because they've never read the whole book. One apologist got raked over the coals recently for suggesting that the skins in the book were the animal skins that people wore, and that's what Mr. Plumb is mocking in his Tweet. Ironically, he's correct about it being ridiculous. Here's Spencer W. Kimball, a Mormon prophet, seer, and revelator, teaching the same thing in General Conference that this delusional man believes, because it's what the Book of Mormon says: I saw a striking contrast in the progress of the Indian people today.... The day of the Lamanites is nigh. For years they have been growing delightsome, and they are now becoming white and delightsome, as they were promised. In this picture of the twenty Lamanite missionaries, fifteen of the twenty were as white as Anglos, five were darker but equally delightsome. The children in the home placement program in Utah are often lighter than their brothers and sisters in the hogans on the reservation. This was in 1960. Notwithstanding the widespread virulent racism that existed in 1960, normal people had at least figured out by then that skin color was not caused by curses from God. But Kimball also taught that masturbation led to homosexuality and women having equal rights led to divorce, so I'm not positive that he wasn't delusional too. Kimball does deserve some credit for lifting the LDS Church's racist ban against full participation by members of African descent. Here's prophet, seer and revelator LeGrand Richards in an interview with Reverend Wesley Walters a couple of months later. Walters asked him if Mormons still believed that Black people were less valiant in the previous life. Richards said, The Lord has never indicated that black skin came because of being less faithful. Now, the Indian; we know why he was changed, don't we? The Book of Mormon tells us that; and he has a dark skin, but he has a promise there that through faithfulness, that they all again become a white and delightsome people. So we haven't anything like that on the colored thing." That was in 1978, in case anyone forgot. Mormon leaders don't say that stuff anymore, but I have yet to hear any of them endorse the "it's metaphorical" hypothesis.
The obvious nineteenth-century cultural context of the Book of Mormon's teachings about skin color is the racist Mound Builder myth. Many European settlers believed that the Native Americans were too primitive to have built the mounds and earthworks that dotted North America, so they speculated that those things had been built by an earlier race of light-skinned people before the darker-skinned people wiped them out. Many European settlers, without the benefit of modern anthropology or DNA science, also believed that the Native Americans were descended from Israelites. Lo and behold, both of those ideas became essential to the narrative of the Book of Mormon, and since neither of those ideas has the benefit of being true, it strains credulity to regard that as a coincidence. The argument that the skin color is metaphorical relies on the book coming out of an ancient Hebrew context without the modern concept of race, but it didn't. It so obviously didn't. But that's not the worst part of the Book of Mormon's racism. The worst part of the Book of Mormon's racism is its assertion that the Native Americans deserved to be displaced and decimated by the Europeans because their ancestors abandoned God. And this is an absolutely core part of the narrative that can't be downplayed as "metaphorical." Over 20 times the book paraphrases the teaching, "Inasmuch as ye shall keep my commandments ye shall prosper in the land; but inasmuch as ye will not keep my commandments ye shall be cut off from my presence." Even the chorus of the children's song "Book of Mormon Stories" (which has its own racism problem) repeats "Given this land, if they lived, rye-chus-lee." (emphasis in original) Few things could make it more obvious that the book was written by a man of European descent putting God's stamp of approval on his ethnocentric worldview. But this is an abhorrent thing to teach anyone, especially the descendants of the people who were displaced and decimated. So again, I have no moral qualms about using Mr. Plumb's deranged Tweet to humiliate the LDS Church, because he's a more solid believer in its foundational text than its own current leaders are. I don't doubt that he causes more problems for them by saying the quiet parts out loud than I do by criticizing them on my blog. But if you're struggling with how to continue believing in the Book of Mormon as a divinely inspired ancient text despite its blatant nineteenth-century racism, don't worry, he has a solution for that too.
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- Amelia Whitlock "I don't know how well you know Christopher Randall Nicholson, but... he's trolling. You should read his blog. It's delightful." - David Young About the AuthorC. Randall Nicholson is a white cisgender Christian male, so you can hate him without guilt, but he's also autistic and asexual, so you can't, unless you're an anti-vaxxer, in which case the feeling is mutual. This blog is where he periodically rants about life, the universe, and/or everything. Archives
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