What LDS Scriptures Actually Teach About Race
A scholarly examination of the "skin of blackness" passages, the curse-mark distinction, and why the Church's disavowal of past racist theories is textually and historically warranted.
The Accusation Stated Plainly
The LDS Discussions overview on race in Latter-day Saint scriptures makes a sweeping claim: that the Book of Mormon, the Book of Moses, and the Book of Abraham constitute a "white supremacist" canon, that the phrase "skin of blackness" is a straightforwardly racist divine decree, and that the Church's recent disavowal of past racist teachings is merely cynical rebranding with no textual basis. It frames apologetic responses to these passages as "silly," "disingenuous," and motivated purely by social pressure rather than honest scholarship.
Each of those claims deserves a direct, evidence-based response. What follows is not an attempt to pretend that no Latter-day Saint leaders ever taught racist doctrines—they did, and those teachings caused real harm. The Church itself has said so in its official Gospel Topics essay, explicitly disavowing them. What this article examines is whether the texts themselves—read in their ancient literary, linguistic, and cultural context—require a racially supremacist interpretation, and whether the critics' reading is as textually obvious as they claim.
The evidence argues decisively that the racist interpretations layered onto LDS scriptures by 19th-century leaders were never demanded by the texts themselves, that the Church's formal repudiation of those interpretations is fully supported by the best available scholarship, and that the "white supremacy" characterization fundamentally misreads what these ancient-style covenant texts are doing.
The Church's Formal Repudiation Is Unambiguous
Before proceeding to the textual arguments, it must be stated that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has issued its clearest and most comprehensive repudiation of racial hierarchy in its history. The official Gospel Topics essay "Race and the Priesthood," approved by the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve, states without qualification:
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — Official Gospel Topics Essay
“Today the Church disavows the theories advanced in the past that black skin is a sign of divine disfavor or curse, or that it reflects unrighteous actions in a premortal life; that mixed-race marriages are a sin; or that blacks or people of any other race or ethnicity are inferior in any way to anyone else. Church leaders today unequivocally condemn all racism, past and present, in any form.”
This is not a vague pastoral statement. It specifically disavows the theological claims that formed the scaffolding of the priesthood ban: the premortal unworthiness theory, the curse-of-Cain lineage theory, and any notion that dark skin signals divine disfavor. President Russell M. Nelson has reinforced this in the strongest terms: “God does not love one race more than another. Your standing before God is not determined by the color of your skin… Any of us who has prejudice toward another race needs to repent.”
The Church has also condemned white supremacy by name: “White supremacist attitudes are morally wrong and sinful, and we condemn them. Church members who promote or pursue a ‘white culture’ or white supremacy agenda are not in harmony with the teachings of the Church.”
LDS Discussions frames these statements as hollow or self-serving. But the essay does something critics rarely acknowledge: it explicitly explains how past leaders erred by importing the racial prejudices of their cultural environment into their theology, and it uses the precise word disavow—a term with legal and ecclesiastical weight far beyond a mere policy update. The question, then, is whether this disavowal is textually supportable. The answer is yes.
The Curse and the Mark Are Textually Distinct
The cornerstone of the LDS Discussions argument is the claim that the "curse" and the "skin of blackness" are synonymous in 2 Nephi 5 and cannot be separated without dishonesty. This claim collapses under a careful reading of the text. The Book of Mormon is actually quite precise:
2 Nephi 5:20–21
“Wherefore, the word of the Lord was fulfilled which he spake unto me, saying that: Inasmuch as they will not hearken unto thy words they shall be cut off from the presence of the Lord. And behold, they were cut off from his presence. And he had caused the cursing to come upon them… a skin of blackness to come upon them.”
The text identifies the curse in verse 20 before introducing the skin in verse 21. The curse is being “cut off from the presence of the Lord”—a spiritual state of separation. The skin darkening then follows as an associated mark, not the curse itself. This is not a modern invention of convenience; BYU religion scholar Rodney Turner, writing in 1989—well before the social pressure critics invoke as the motive for apologetic reinterpretation—stressed that the curse and mark were “two separate, but related, things,” that the actual curse was the “withdrawal of God's Spirit,” and that “moral and spiritual superiority are determined by conduct, not color.”
Alma 3:7 confirms the mark's distinct function: “the Lord God did set a mark upon Nitihah, and upon his people… that they might not mix with” the Nephites. The mark is explicitly designed as a tribal boundary marker, not a statement about the moral worth of the people who bear it. Alma 3:8 adds another dimension: the mark served to preserve the Lord's people by preventing intermarriage at a time of covenantal separation. This is analogous to the Mosaic prohibition on marrying Canaanites—a boundary rooted in religious loyalty, not racial hierarchy.
The mark's impermanence further undermines the racial reading. When Lamanites converted, the curse was removed (Alma 23:18), and in 3 Nephi 2:14–16, Lamanite converts who “had united with the Nephites” experienced a physical change described as their “skin became white like unto the Nephites.” Whatever the precise nature of this change, the logic is unambiguously spiritual-first: conversion—not genealogy, not miscegenation—is what changes the condition. A racially determined mark, by definition, cannot be removed by faith. The Book of Mormon’s mark can be and was removed.
Theologian Michael Austin, writing in By Common Consent, extends this argument by locating the deepest curse not in skin color at all but in separation itself—the fracturing of a unified family into warring factions. He notes that 4 Nephi 1:35–38 describes the curse’s return when people voluntarily reintroduce the labels “Nephites” and “Lamanites” after 231 years of unity, with no mention of skin color at the point of renewed division. The curse is tribalism; the mark was its ancient-world expression.
Ancient Near Eastern Covenant Curse Language
The most powerful contextual argument against the "white supremacy" reading is that the kind of language found in 2 Nephi 5 has direct, well-documented parallels in ancient Near Eastern treaty and covenant texts—parallels that were entirely unknown to Joseph Smith in 1830 and were only excavated and published by scholars decades later.
The Succession Treaty of Esarhaddon (672 BC), an Assyrian vassal treaty discovered and published in the 20th century, employs blackness as covenant-curse language: “May they make your skin as black as pitch and crude oil,” describing the fate of those who violate the treaty. This is not racial language; it is covenantal judgment language—darkness symbolizing spiritual death and divine rejection. Identical symbolism appears across ancient Near Eastern, Egyptian, Arabic, Hebrew, and early Christian sources.
In BYU Studies scholar T. J. Uriona’s 2023 analysis (Vol. 62, Issue 3), he identifies intertextual connections between Nephi’s account and both the Mosaic tradition and this prominent Esarhaddon treaty formula, establishing that the “skin of blackness” terminology reflects ancient literary conventions for expressing divine displeasure rather than literal biological transformation. Biblical examples of the same convention are abundant: Lamentations 4:7–8 describes princes’ faces “turned blacker than soot” as a metaphor for spiritual ruin, while Job 30:26–30 uses darkened skin to express affliction under divine judgment.
Ancient Parallels to Covenant Curse Language
- Esarhaddon Treaty (672 BC) — “May they make your skin as black as pitch” as covenant-violation curse formula
- Lamentations 4:7–8 — Princes’ faces “turned blacker than soot” as spiritual ruin metaphor
- Job 30:26–30 — “My skin is black upon me” expressing affliction under divine judgment
- Egyptian physiognomics — Character expressed through external appearance as ancient convention (Malina & Rohrbaugh)
- Song of Solomon 1:5 — “I am black but comely,” used metaphorically by early Christians for sin/redemption without racial meaning
Brant A. Gardner, in his FAIR publication on the “skin of blackness,” contextualizes this within ancient collectivist worldview categories: ancient societies operated with insider/outsider logic rather than modern racial categories. The “other” was automatically marked as corrupt, and that marking operated on group membership lines, not biological determinism. The Book of Mormon’s white/dark contrast reflects these ancient literary conventions, not 19th-century racial hierarchy—a point reinforced by the fact that the Book of Mormon never uses the word “race” at all and never describes Native Americans as “red.”
The critical question for historical authenticity is whether these ancient literary parallels were accessible to Joseph Smith. They were not. The Esarhaddon treaty texts, the Mesoamerican archaeological data on body paint, and the scholarly framework for understanding ancient Near Eastern covenant curse language were all products of 20th-century scholarship. If Joseph Smith was merely transcribing the racial prejudices of his own culture, why does the text’s internal logic align so precisely with ancient literary conventions he could not have known?
The Maya Body Paint Evidence
Gerrit M. Steenblik’s 2021 study in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship introduces a significant Mesoamerican dimension that LDS Discussions entirely ignores. Steenblik documents the well-established Maya practice of applying charcoal-based body paint for warfare, coming-of-age rituals, hunting, and ceremonial occasions. Bishop Diego de Landa, writing in 1549, observed that unmarried Maya men “painted themselves black until they were married.”
The textual evidence in the Book of Mormon supports this reading. In Alma 3:4, the Amlicites “marked themselves”—a self-applied mark—and then verse 13 explains God used the Lamanites’ self-marking to confirm the divine sign. Mayanist scholar Kerry Hull has stated there is “absolutely no justification” for assuming actual genetic skin pigmentation changes when body-paint traditions are a well-documented cultural feature of precisely the kind of Mesoamerican populations the Book of Mormon describes.
Steenblik notes that the mark appears only once as a reported event (2 Nephi 5:21), applies to a small initial group at the time of the family schism, and is followed by a centuries-long silence on physical appearance differences in most Nephite-Lamanite encounters. This textual pattern—an episodic marker rather than a transgenerational genetic trait—is inexplicable on the racial-pigmentation reading but entirely consistent with cultural body-paint practices.
Hugh Nibley anticipated this conclusion decades earlier, emphasizing that the mark was “reversible” and “natural and human” in its application—language that aligns with a self-administered cultural practice, not a miraculous genetic transformation. Whatever one concludes about the precise nature of the mark, the Mesoamerican evidence demonstrates that the “racist divine pigmentation change” is not the only reading the evidence supports, and it is not the one best supported by the actual text.
Moses 7 and the People of Canaan: An Anti-Racist Text?
LDS Discussions cites Moses 7:8 and 7:22 as additional evidence of embedded racism: the “blackness” upon the children of Canaan and the statement that the seed of Cain were “black, and had not place among them.” These passages demand contextual analysis rather than presentist application.
Interpreter Foundation scholar Adam Stokes has proposed a counter-reading of Moses 7 that deserves serious consideration. Stokes argues on four grounds that the text does not curse the people of Canaan themselves but rather condemns the racial prejudice of other groups toward them. He demonstrates that: (1) the curse in Moses 7 falls on the land through environmental heat, not on the people themselves; (2) the “residue” who are actually condemned in verses 20–22 are everyone else—those who rejected and hated their black brethren; (3) Enoch avoids preaching to the Canaanites not from divine command but because prevailing hatred from other groups would obstruct his ministry; and (4) “racism” as modern racial ideology based on skin-color inferiority did not exist in antiquity and emerged around 1600 CE—making it anachronistic to read ancient texts through that lens.
Even setting aside Stokes’ reading, biblical scholarship is clear that the connection between Cain’s “mark” and dark skin is “a postbiblical development and an unbiblical interpretation.” The Hebrew word for “mark” (ot) is not normally attached to physical characteristics. The curse of Cain in the biblical text involves exile and the non-yielding of ground—not skin color. That association was introduced by later interpreters—including early LDS leaders—and is not present in the source texts.
The argument that Joseph Smith simply encoded his own culture’s racism into these texts faces this persistent problem: on the Stokes reading, Moses 7 actually inverts the racist narrative, presenting the people who despise their black brethren as the condemned party. If Joseph were simply importing antebellum racism, this is the last text he would have written.
Book of Abraham Facsimile 3, Figure 6: A Misreading of the Critique
LDS Discussions asserts that Joseph Smith’s identification of the dark-colored figure in Facsimile 3 as “a slave” demonstrates racial bias, and that someone chiseled off the nose of the Anubis figure to disguise its divine character. This claim requires scrutiny on multiple levels.
First, Joseph Smith’s explanations of the Book of Abraham facsimiles were never claimed to be literal Egyptological translations in the modern academic sense. The Church’s own Gospel Topics essay on the Book of Abraham acknowledges that “the relationship between those explanations and the papyri is not fully understood.” Applying Egyptian Anubis-identification standards to evaluate Joseph’s explanations assumes a mode of correspondence that Joseph himself never articulated in those terms.
Second, within Egyptian funerary iconography, Anubis is depicted black specifically because black represented the fertile soil of the Nile and the promise of resurrection—not racial identity. Interpreting the black color of an Egyptian deity as indicating racial inferiority is itself a modern Western projection entirely foreign to Egyptian symbolic conventions. The critique, ironically, imports the very racial reading it claims to find in the text.
Third, the position of Figure 6 in the court/judgment scene corresponds functionally to a guide or attendant conducting the presentation—a functional role that Joseph Smith’s label partially captures in terms of ceremonial servitude, even if the precise divine identity is missed. Scholars including John Gee have noted that Joseph’s facsimile explanations demonstrate functional accuracy in identifying ceremonial scenes that is difficult to attribute to coincidence.
None of this resolves every Egyptological question about the facsimiles. But the assertion that Joseph Smith looked at a black figure and identified it as a slave purely out of racial prejudice is not sustained by a close analysis. His explanation identifies the figure’s functional role within a court scene—a role Egyptological analysis also identifies as a functional attendant. The charge of racial projection requires attributing a motive (racist assumption based on color) that the actual explanatory framework does not display.
What the Book of Mormon Actually Says About Racial Equality
The most remarkable feature of LDS Discussions’ treatment of the Book of Mormon is what it does not discuss: the book’s extensive, repeated, and theologically explicit teaching of racial equality. These passages were written from the very beginning of the text and were never “updated” under social pressure:
2 Nephi 26:33
“He inviteth them all to come unto him and partake of his goodness; and he denieth none that come unto him, black and white, bond and free, male and female; and he remembereth the heathen; and all are alike unto God, both Jew and Gentile.”
Jacob 3:9
“Revile no more against them because of the darkness of their skins; neither shall ye revile against them because of their filthiness; but ye shall remember your own filthiness, and remember that their filthiness came because of their fathers.”
Alma 26:37
“Now my brethren, we see that God is mindful of every people, whatsoever land they may be in; yea, he numbereth his people, and his bowels of mercy are over all the earth.”
Jacob 3:9 is particularly significant because it is set precisely in the context of Nephite-Lamanite racial tension—and Jacob explicitly rebukes the “white and delightsome” Nephites for their contempt toward the Lamanites, pointing out that the Lamanites were more morally upright in their family practices. This is not a text that elevates white-skinned people as morally superior. It uses the Lamanites as a moral rebuke to the supposedly “righteous” Nephites.
2 Nephi 26:33—“all are alike unto God”—is a categorical statement of divine impartiality, written in the same textual neighborhood as the curse passages, that a genuinely “white supremacist” text would never contain. The charge of white supremacy requires us to ignore these passages entirely. A rigorous reading does not permit that selective approach.
The Book of Mormon also records that the greatest period of righteousness—the 231 years of 4 Nephi—is explicitly a period of racial unity, when the distinctions between “Nephites” and “Lamanites” ceased entirely. Within the logic of the text, racial division is the curse; racial unity is the eschatological ideal.
The Argument That Prophets Changed Only Under Social Pressure
A central argument in LDS Discussions is that the Church only changed its racial teachings because of social pressure, not genuine theological development, and that the text was never altered to match the Church’s new interpretation. This argument has two significant weaknesses.
First, Joseph Smith himself made changes. In 1840, he altered at least one reference of “white and delightsome” in 2 Nephi 30:6 to “pure and delightsome.” LDS Discussions cites this but uses it only to raise further questions. The more important observation is that this change occurred in 1840—when there was arguably more social pressure in antebellum America to maintain racial hierarchy, not less. If Joseph were simply conforming to cultural norms, changing “white” to “pure” in that environment is precisely the opposite of what social-pressure theory predicts.
Second, the argument that “social pressure is the only possible explanation for changing a teaching” is self-sealing. It assumes in advance that revelation does not occur, and then interprets every change as social accommodation. This is not a falsifiable historical argument—it is a philosophical assumption dressed as an empirical finding. Any institution that ever corrected a prior error would be subject to the identical charge.
Elder Bruce R. McConkie’s statement after the 1978 revelation is instructive: “Forget everything that I have said, or what President Brigham Young… has said in days past that is contrary to the present revelation. We spoke with a limited understanding.” This is not a corporation reluctantly updating its product branding. It is a senior Church leader publicly repudiating his own prior teachings and those of his predecessors in the most unambiguous terms available. That kind of institutional self-correction is not consistent with a purely cynical public-relations strategy.
The deeper point is this: even if social pressure played a role in the timing, the textual warrant for the current teaching—that all are alike unto God and that dark skin is not a sign of divine disfavor—was present in the scriptures from the beginning. The texts did not need to change because they never, on careful reading, required the racist interpretation that was layered onto them by flawed human interpreters.
Distinguishing Cultural Encoding from Eternal Doctrine
The most sophisticated version of LDS Discussions’ argument is that the Book of Mormon reflects a 19th-century worldview and that its racial passages prove Joseph Smith wrote it rather than translated it. This is a reasonable argument about authorship, but it is a poor argument about what the text means.
All ancient texts are culturally encoded. The Bible uses the ancient Israelite understanding that diseases were divine punishment, that demons caused illness, and that slavery was a legitimate institution. Christians do not conclude from this that Christianity is therefore pro-slavery. They recognize the distinction between the culturally specific medium and the theological content carried by that medium.
The same hermeneutic applies here. Even if one grants that the Book of Mormon’s skin-color language reflects ancient categorical thinking about insider/outsider covenantal boundaries, the theological content of the text—“all are alike unto God,” Jacob’s rebuke of Nephite racism, the Lamanites’ superior fidelity in marriage—is not racially hierarchical. The cultural encoding and the eternal doctrine are not the same thing, and conflating them is the central error in LDS Discussions’ analysis.
Armand L. Mauss, a respected LDS sociologist, observed that Joseph Smith himself never used the word “race” in connection with the Book of Mormon and later moved toward spiritual quality terminology in his revisions. The text does not operate with the biological-hereditary racial categories of modern racism; it operates with the covenantal, behavioral categories of ancient Near Eastern religion, where curse and blessing are always conditional on conduct and always reversible through repentance.
That is not white supremacy. That is the logic of covenant theology: blessing and cursing tied to fidelity and rebellion, available equally to all who choose either path. The doctrine is stated plainly in 2 Nephi 26:33—“all are alike unto God”—and it has never been revised, retracted, or updated under any social pressure, because it required no revision.
Conclusion: What the Texts Require and What They Do Not
The honest accounting of this question requires acknowledging both what is true and what is false in the LDS Discussions presentation.
What is true: many Latter-day Saint leaders, from Brigham Young through the mid-20th century, taught deeply racist doctrines. They caused genuine harm to Black members, Native American members, and Polynesian members. They often cited LDS scriptures as warrant for those teachings. The Church has explicitly acknowledged this, used the word “disavow” to describe its current relationship to those theories, and condemned white supremacy by name.
What is not true: that those racist doctrines were demanded by a fair reading of the texts; that the texts cannot be read any other way; that modern scholarly reinterpretation has no textual or ancient-context basis; or that the Book of Mormon is a “white supremacist” document. The ancient Near Eastern parallel texts, the Maya body-paint evidence, the internal textual logic of curse-versus-mark, the Book of Mormon’s own explicit statements of divine impartiality, and the scholarly work of BYU, FAIR, the Interpreter Foundation, and independent LDS academics all converge on a different conclusion: the racial hierarchy was imported into the scriptures by flawed human interpreters, not inscribed in the texts themselves.
The Church’s current teaching—that all are alike unto God, that dark skin is not a sign of divine disfavor, and that racism in any form is morally wrong—is not a late accommodation to social pressure. It is the teaching that was present in the canon from the beginning, articulated most clearly and permanently in 2 Nephi 26:33, and has simply been recovered from beneath layers of culturally encoded misreading.
That recovery is not dishonest. It is what faithful, rigorous engagement with scripture looks like.