Mormon missionaries ride their bikes around any and all Latin American cities I have visited. And the list is 22 countries. I think most churches are trolling for converts in more fertile soil than the USA where most people are educated beyond falling for fairy tales such as bearded men sitting in the sky watching all of us.
FWIW, Vai Sikahema, Philly sportscaster and former Eagle, is a Mormon.
BTW, he’s the uncle-in-law of Jon “Napolean Dynamite” Heder
Moderator Warning
DingoeelGringo, this is an official warning for religious jabs in General Question. Given that you’ve been repeatedly warned and cautioned about this, and you are just back from suspension, your posting privileges will be under discussion.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Thanks for the info. I was referring to Latinos, mostly from Mexico but probably a handful from South and Central America. I’ve seen forms listing “white non-Hispanic”, “white Hispanic”, “black”, and “other”, as well as forms with a list of races plus a separate selection of “Hispanic” vs “non-Hispanic”. I was unaware that I could offend people by describing my neighbors as “white Hispanic”.
I would expect they are all of the human race, though I don’t know. Does anyone know of any Mormons who are not human?
Some attempts to divide people up are wild and weird. The last census form I filled out I only fit into the category of “non Hispanic white.” I always mark “other” and write in “Human.”
I had a plane layover in SLC airport once and the place looked more blond than Stockholm.
That was the word I was trying to think of but it just wouldn’t come to me, sorry for my mistaken nomenclature.
But again - the ethnic mix of most US big cities is a result of certain migration patterns. Southern states had slaves, northern states had escaped slaves - that predates SLC. After the civil war and to the turn of the century, black people moved north to get factory jobs and other employment that paid better than sharecropping. Salt Lake City was not noted for its industry, especially around 1900, so missed that migration. The other ethnic groups - Italians and others on the east coast, Chinese and Japanese on the west coast - tended to stay where they landed, as that’s where the jobs were. Again, SLC didn’t have as much of a jobs draw. Ditto for Hispanics - they predominate in the south and the big cities… the question then is does Salt Lake City have the job openings that would attract recent latino migrants? The recent internal migrations - out to California, south from the rust belt to the sun belt - also bypass SLC.
Of course, if the locals had a policy of not wanting to hire off-white newcomers, that would tend to discourage newcomers; but the same prejudice was common across the country and we still hear about black porters and shoe-shiners.
This topic reminds me of the story (apocryphal?) decades ago when the North Dakota National Guard was asked to explain why their membership did not have the same (small) proportion of blacks as the North Dakota population. The response was something along the lines of: “3% of the population of ND is black. Of that, 2% are members of the air force stationed at the bomber bases here or their young families, and so not candidates for membership. The other 1% are scholarship students from outside ND here to fill UND quotas, and so do not need Guard pay and college students generally are not interested to join the Guard.” (This was the 1970’s, around the time of the Vietnam war)
After all, originally the settlers were all adherents who fit the mold of “good Mormons”. So the question is, why would ethnic minorities move to Salt Lake City in any large numbers?
Wikipedia, based on the 2010 census numbers, shows that the ethnic breakdown of SLC is 65.6% white non-Hispanic, 22.3% Hispanic of any race, 2.7% black and 4.4% Asian. I would imagine a lot of that “Asian” is Polynesian, since there are a large number of Mormons from Samoa and other Pacific islands.
As you picked up her comment from two years ago, perhaps you also noted that she didn’t provide a response to my follow-up. Since you’ve decide to get involved, perhaps you can respond.
OK, so everyone doesn’t have to go back and try to figure out things, dangermom and I were having a back and forth about the blatant discrimination against blacks which the Mormon Church used to do.
For over 120 years, blacks could not hold the priesthood (which is given to almost all men and boys over the age of 12, so it’s unlike the priesthood in other religions). Not only that, but blacks were not given other basic rights.
From my thread over in MPSIMP
Brigham Young, Mormons’ second greatest prophet, officially taught that a man should be killed under the doctrine of blood atonement for mixing his seed with blacks.
The Book of Mormon itself captures the inherently racist period of its inception, the early 19th century New England. It explicitly teaches that God cursed the “Lamanites,” the ancestors of the American Indians, with a dark skin
This simply is the racist view of the early 18th century and it has become canonized doctrine of the Mormon church.
Most Mormons I personally know are not racist, but the leaders have been some of the worst.
Mormons want to pretend that it never happened, but it did. There are hundreds of racist quotes from prophets stretching back from Josephs Smith all the way to the modern era.
[/quote]
I’m not going to post giant blocks of quotation, so if you would like you can read what they say here. There were at least 2 black men ordained to the priesthood in the 1800s. The Timeline on that site is most interesting comparing and contrasting church related race relations and race relations in the US.
Other than on forms probably originally designed before the invention of television, the only place I’ve encountered the term “white hispanic” was during George Zimmerman’s trial and the lead up to it. The press certainly seemed to enjoy having the white prefix there, anyway. Can’t say I’ve heard the term used elsewhere.
I’m not going to run off and do your homework for this first thing you googled.
I made some specific claims, i.e., that the Mormon theology is inherently racist, and gave some specific examples, including the one I used earlier with Dangermom in which the First Presidency, the ruling body of the church, officially stated that blacks were less valiant in the pre-existance, and this was the reason they were not allowed to hold the priesthood (and the basic rights).
This doctrine, along with Brigham Young’s horribly racist views, even for the 19th century, have never been specifically disavowed…
Mormon doctrine holds that the color of one’s skin is an indication of one’s inherent righteousness, as is canonized in the Book of Mormon and other scripture.
Spencer Kimball, the leader of the church when I was growing up, made reference many times to this concept, including commenting that the young American Indians Mormons incited from their own homes to get educated in Salt Lake City, were “several shades lighter” than their parents.
The Constitution, when it says, “We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America,” meant just what it said without reference to color or condition, ad infinitum.
( Source:History of the Church 6:198)
Doesn’t sound like a racist to me
Also TB
"During the first two decades of the Church’s existence, a few black men were ordained to the priesthood. One of these men, Elijah Abel, also participated in temple ceremonies in Kirtland, Ohio, and was later baptized as proxy for deceased relatives in Nauvoo, Illinois. There is no reliable evidence that any black men were denied the priesthood during Joseph Smith’s lifetime. In a private Church council three years after Joseph Smith’s death, Brigham Young praised Q. Walker Lewis, a black man who had been ordained to the priesthood, saying, “We have one of the best Elders, an African.”4
In 1852, President Brigham Young publicly announced that men of black African descent could no longer be ordained to the priesthood, though thereafter blacks continued to join the Church through baptism and receiving the gift of the Holy Ghost. Following the death of Brigham Young, subsequent Church presidents restricted blacks from receiving the temple endowment or being married in the temple. Over time, Church leaders and members advanced many theories to explain the priesthood and temple restrictions. None of these explanations is accepted today as the official doctrine of the Church.
…"The Church proclaims that redemption through Jesus Christ is available to the entire human family on the conditions God has prescribed. It affirms that God is “no respecter of persons” and emphatically declares that anyone who is righteous—regardless of race—is favored of Him. The teachings of the Church in relation to God’s children are epitomized by a verse in the second book of Nephi: “[The Lord] denieth none that cometh unto him, black and white, bond and free, male and female;… all are alike unto God, both Jew and Gentile.”
https://www.lds.org/topics/race-and-the-priesthood?lang=eng
So believe what you want, but The Church isn’t racist. And this isn’t what this thread is about anyway.
“Black skin is a sin, but that Q. guy is alright!”
Black skin was never called a sin or a curse. It was postulated that when God distinguished one group of people from another one group was made to look different via darker skin. This was not sinful in of itself, it was their own actions that were sinful . therefore anyone with skin of any color who makes good choices are righteous . Again, the misconstrued notion that skin color made you sinful is not LDS doctrine.
In fact
“Black skin is a punishment for your ancestor’s sin, but that Q. guy is alright!”
Distinction without a difference.
I’m sure that among members, quoting the preamble to the constitution is a sufficient rebuttal to a complex argument, but to non-believers, it is simply irrelevant and pointless.
I’m not simply arguing that the historical discrimination against blacks is evidence of racism, but that Mormon theology is racist to the core.
I don’t know how familiar you are with the Book of Mormon, but I’ll summarize it for the purpose of our argument and for other people who have never read it.
The basic story is that a small group of ancient Israelites were told by God to leave Jerusalem in about 600 BC, just before it was destroyed by the Babylonians and many of the inhabitants were taken away.
Of the families that went to America, there quickly became two rival groups, the righteous Nephites, who remained “white and delightsome” (the author, Joseph Smith, believed that ancient Israelites were white rather than brown) until they were wiped out in a genocide by their bitter enemies, the Lamanites, the ancestors of the Indians.
The passage I quoted above from the Book of Mormon shows God cursing these Indian forefathers with a dark skin because they were evil.
The idea that God curses people with dark skin was a commonly held belief at the time and place where the Book of Mormon was created, in the early 19th century, New England, so it’s not unexpected that it would find its way into Mormon scripture.
The concept of skin color as a divine punishment was reinforced in later scripture which Joseph Smith produced, including the Book of Moses and the Book of Abraham.
As I posted above, later prophets took that and ran with it, going so far as Brigham Young stating
Many apologists like to say that Brigham Young was the product of his times, and many people were racists, but even then in the 1860s, calling for a death penalty for sex with a black person would have been extreme.
Quoting from an unsigned essay on the LDS website isn’t a rebuttal. As I pointed out above, the doctrine that Blacks were less valiant in the preexistance has never been officially denounced by any of the ruling bodies of the church. Nor has any of the canonized scriptural doctrine concerning the curses God places on the seed of Cain or the ancestors of the Indians ever been removed.
As far as the question if this is germane to the discussion, please let me remind you that you were the one who chose to resurrect it. If you had wished to let sleeping dogs lie, we would not be having this exchange.
However, the question of racism and the ethnic composition of Mormons is intrinsically combined. The LDS church avoided teaching in Africa and placed limitations on its involvement in Brazil until after the 1978 change in doctrine. Were the racist policies not in place, there may have been more black members. A GQ answer to the demographics will follow in my next post.