I am a black woman married to a white man for the last 20 years. I am sorry, but could not join a “church” that had such racist origins.
“I am told that racial slurs and denigrating remarks are sometimes heard among us,” Hinckley said during the all-male priesthood session. “I remind you that no man who makes disparaging remarks concerning those of another race can consider himself a true disciple of Christ. Nor can he consider himself to be in harmony with the teachings of the Church of Christ. How can any man holding the Melchizedek Priesthood arrogantly assume that he is eligible for the priesthood whereas another who lives a righteous life but whose skin is of a different color is ineligible?”
Almost every American denomination split between north and south during the 1850s. Southerners insisted on defending slavery, while many northerners wanted to denounce it.
Interestingly, one can find a great deal of support in the Bible for the institution of slavery, but none at all for racism. In the ancient world, the two had nothing at all to do with each other.
Sadly, while Christians were at the forefront of the abolition movement, other Christians were brought along kicking and screaming.
It is a sad fact that not everyone awakens to evil right away when that evil is embedded in the culture, even when opposition to that same evil is also embedded in the very same culture. It takes time, even generations, to work all that through.
Its human nature. It takes time for some evils to be overturned, even among otherwise good and virtuous people. Christ has a way of undermining evil, but not all of it will be worked out in any one generation, not even among Christians.
Here is a link to excerpts from the Encyclopedia on Religion in the South. It really sheds light on the institutional racism in Southern churches.
Have you removed the beam?
Racist as compared to what? The Mormon church from its founding opposed slavery. You can’t really say that about most of the other Christian denominations and other religions in the New World.
Sometime before the ‘revelation’ came to chief ‘Prophet’ Spencer Kimball in June 1978, General Authority, Bruce R McConkie had said:
“The Blacks are denied the Priesthood; under no circumstances can they hold this delegation of authority from the Almighty.
The Negroes are not equal with other races where the receipt of certain blessings are concerned, particularly the priesthood and the temple blessings that flow there from, but this inequality is not of man’s origin, it is the Lord’s doings.” (Mormon Doctrine, pp. 526-527).
The 1978 revelation doesn’t say blacks are no longer of the lineage of Cain, nor does it say that they no longer did these things in preexistence. It does not say they are not cursed with black skin.