Race in the Scriptures of Mormonism: A Scholarly Response

Examining the textual, historical, and theological evidence that ldsdiscussions.com’s overview misreads, omits, or distorts in its case against Latter-day Saint scripture.

Overview and Methodology

The ldsdiscussions.com page titled “Overview of Race in the Scriptures of Mormonism” presents itself as a straightforward reading of what the text plainly says. In reality, it is a selective anthology of the worst-attested historical interpretations of Latter-day Saint scripture, reads every ambiguous passage in the most literal and most damaging direction possible, ignores a substantial body of scholarly rebuttal literature, and conflates what individual leaders speculated with what the scriptures themselves teach. This response engages each major claim directly using the primary texts, ancient Near Eastern (ANE) comparative literature, the internal logic of the Book of Mormon narrative itself, and the Church’s own official positions.

The methodology of ldsdiscussions.com rests on four persistent errors: (1) treating the most literal possible reading of figurative ancient language as the only honest reading; (2) treating the speculative statements of individual leaders as binding doctrinal equivalents to canonized scripture; (3) ignoring the Book of Mormon’s own strong universalist counter-texts; and (4) cherry-picking evidence while suppressing the significant scholarly work—including work by non-believing and believing scholars alike—that complicates its narrative. Each of these errors is examined below.

This response does not minimize the genuine difficulty these passages present or the real harm that racist applications of them caused. It argues instead that the difficulties are far more complex than ldsdiscussions.com acknowledges, that the weight of scholarly evidence points away from a racial-biological reading of the relevant texts, and that the site’s argument defeats itself at key points.

Claim 1: “Skin of Blackness” Is Obviously Literal Racial Pigmentation

The site asserts that 2 Nephi 5:21–23 straightforwardly teaches that God changed the Lamanites’ skin color as a racial curse, and that apologists who argue otherwise are being “disingenuous” and “silly.” This claim requires the complete suppression of a broad body of scholarly and contextual evidence.

Ancient Near Eastern Parallels

The language of darkened skin as a metaphor for divine disfavor, covenant violation, and spiritual death is deeply embedded in ancient Near Eastern literary convention—precisely the cultural milieu from which Nephi’s account originates. The Succession Treaty of Esarhaddon (c. 672 BC), a genuine ancient treaty contemporary with Lehi’s era, contains the following curse formula: “May they make your skin as black as pitch.” This is not a curse of racial pigmentation; it is a curse of death, disgrace, and ruin. Scholars of Assyriology treat this as self-evident.

Lamentations 4:7–8

“Her Nazirites were purer than snow, whiter than milk, more ruddy in body than rubies… Their visage is blacker than a coal; they are not known in the streets.”

No critic accuses Lamentations of racism. The faces of Nazirites do not literally turn black. The language describes moral and spiritual catastrophe. The same interpretive charity ldsdiscussions.com would extend to Lamentations 4 it refuses to extend to 2 Nephi 5. The Quran similarly describes the Day of Judgment as a day “when faces whiten and faces blacken” (Surah 3:106) as a purely spiritual metaphor for salvation and condemnation. Egyptian royal texts describe the pharaoh as “white of countenance” to symbolize purity and divine favor, not racial identity. In each of these ANE-adjacent literary traditions, dark/light skin language is a spiritual and moral idiom, not a racial-biological category.

The Internal Narrative Logic of the Book of Mormon Undermines the Literal Reading

The most powerful evidence against the literal pigmentation reading does not come from apologetic speculation—it comes from the Book of Mormon text itself. Ldsdiscussions.com does not engage these internal contradictions of the literal view:

Internal Textual Problems for the Literal View

Alma 55:7–9 — Moroni searches specifically for a Lamanite soldier and is unable to immediately identify one among his troops. If Lamanites bore a visible, distinct skin color, this search would be unnecessary. Visual indistinguishability suggests no biological pigmentation difference existed.

3 Nephi 2:14–15 — Lamanites who join the Nephites have the curse removed and “their skin became white like unto the Nephites.” This occurs rapidly and is tied directly to covenant membership, not genetics. Biological skin color does not change on conversion.

Jacob 3:8 — Jacob tells the Nephites that the Lamanites “shall be whiter than you” if the Nephites do not repent—a reversal of the “mark” that makes no sense if skin is biological but perfect sense if it is a spiritual-covenantal status marker.

3 Nephi 19:24–25 — The disciples become “as white as the countenance and also the garments of Jesus.” No one argues this is a literal pigmentation change. If this passage is figurative, the interpretive rule must apply consistently throughout the text.

4 Nephi 1:17 — After Christ’s visit, “there were no more Lamanites.” All people became one. The “mark” disappears when the covenant distinction disappears—exactly what one expects of a social/covenantal boundary marker, not a biological trait.

Scholar Brant A. Gardner, whose six-volume critical commentary on the Book of Mormon (Second Witness: Analytical and Contextual Commentary on the Book of Mormon) is among the most detailed scholarly treatments of the text from a faithful perspective, argues at length that the Nephite/Lamanite skin color language functions as a social and religious boundary marker, not a description of biological pigmentation. He draws on the work of social anthropologists Malina and Neyrey on physiognomics in the ancient world—the convention by which moral and spiritual conditions were understood to manifest visibly on the body. Within that cultural framework, a divine mark distinguishing covenant-keepers from covenant-breakers is precisely the kind of language an ancient author would use.

Douglas Campbell, examining all 28 uses of white/black skin language in the Book of Mormon, concluded: “White-skinned Nephites and black-skinned Lamanites are metaphors for cultures, not for skin colour.” Marvin Perkins demonstrates that “black and white” consistently function as synonyms for “wicked and righteous” throughout the text through comparative passages such as 2 Nephi 26:33, Alma 1:30, and Alma 11:44.

The site dismisses the “clothes” interpretation as “silly,” but it does not engage the stronger scholarly position—which is not that “skin” means animal skins used as garments, but that the “skin of blackness” is a covenantal-spiritual boundary marker expressed in the standard ANE idiom of the author’s cultural background. That is the position of Gardner, Campbell, Perkins, and others. The site does not address it because it cannot refute it easily.

None of this is to say the passages are without difficulty. The passages have clearly been read in racial-biological terms by many readers, including many Church leaders. That is a genuine historical problem. But the claim that the “obvious” and “only honest” reading is the racial-biological one is simply not defensible given the ANE context, the internal logic of the narrative, and the established scholarly literature on the text.

Claim 2: The Curse and the Mark Are the Same Thing

The site acknowledges the apologetic argument that the “curse” and the “mark” are distinct, then dismisses it by appealing to Alma 3:6, which calls the dark skins “a curse upon them because of their transgression.” This is presented as a decisive refutation. It is not.

Alma 3:14 itself reads: “And this was done that their seed might be distinguished from the seed of their brethren, that thereby the Lord God might preserve his people, that they might not mix and believe in incorrect traditions which would prove their destruction.” The mark functions as a boundary marker for covenant purposes—not a punishment embedded in biological heredity. Alma 3:18 explicitly notes the Amlicites “set the mark upon themselves”—they self-applied the very mark the site treats as a miraculous God-imposed racial change. Scholar John Tvedtnes notes this: the Book of Mormon distinguishes the divinely caused mark from the self-applied mark in a way that is difficult to reconcile with a purely biological-pigmentation model but perfectly consistent with a model of self-identifying boundary markers (clothing, body paint, or cultural practice) that signal covenantal allegiance.

Hugh Nibley, whose mastery of ancient Near Eastern materials was profound, argued that the mark in the text is “artificial”—it is placed or recognized, not inherent. This is corroborated by Mesoamerican archaeological evidence showing that tattooing (with black pigments) and dark body paint were used by many ancient American cultures as ritual and covenantal markers, precisely the kind of “mark” that would be described in the Book of Mormon’s terminology.

The site never engages the Alma 3:18 self-marking passage, which is the strongest textual evidence against the literal biological interpretation. This is not an oversight—the passage would require addressing the boundary-marker theory seriously rather than dismissing it.

Claim 3: The Book of Mormon Is a White Supremacist Document

This is the site’s most inflammatory and least defensible claim. It requires the complete suppression of the Book of Mormon’s own explicit anti-racist universalism—universalism that was radically ahead of its time in any cultural context.

2 Nephi 26:33

“He doeth that which is good among the children of men; and he doeth nothing save it be plain unto the children of men; and 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.”

This verse is not a footnote. It is a central theological declaration of the same text the site accuses of white supremacy. A white supremacist document does not explicitly and emphatically declare that “black and white… all are alike unto God.” The site quotes this verse nowhere in its overview. Its absence is telling.

The Book of Mormon’s treatment of the Lamanites is also not uniformly negative in the narrative. Consider:

Lamanite Moral Superiority in the Narrative

Jacob 3:5 — Jacob rebukes the Nephites by pointing out that the Lamanites, whom the Nephites despise, are more righteous in their family practices. The site quotes this verse to criticize Jacob’s statement on polygamy while completely omitting its primary point: the “cursed” Lamanites are morally superior to the “blessed” Nephites.

Helaman 15:4–8 — The Lamanites’ conversion is described in glowing terms; they are praised for their faithfulness and said to be “more righteous than the Nephites.”

The Anti-Nephi-Lehies (Alma 23–24) — Lamanite converts bury their weapons and choose death over violence. They are presented as a moral exemplar of discipleship unmatched by the Nephites in the surrounding narrative.

The Book of Mormon’s ending — It is the Nephites, not the Lamanites, who are destroyed for their pride and wickedness. If this were a white supremacist document, it would not end with the “white” civilization being annihilated for moral failure while the “dark” civilization survives.

Scholars Nicholas J. Frederick and Joseph M. Spencer, writing from a critical but sympathetic perspective, acknowledge that the Book of Mormon’s racial narrative is complex: it “shows what it looks like when a people develops systemic racism”—and then shows the moral failure and destruction of that people. The text is not endorsing Nephite ideology; it is critiquing it.

The site’s definition of “white supremacy” requires the Oxford Dictionary’s definition of a belief that white people “should therefore dominate society.” The Book of Mormon does not teach this. It teaches a covenant model in which righteousness—not skin color—determines divine favor, and it repeatedly demonstrates that the ostensibly “white” group failed that covenant while the ostensibly “dark” group sometimes exceeded it. That is the opposite of white supremacy.

Claim 4: Leader Quotes Prove the Doctrine

The site devotes considerable space to quoting Church leaders—Brigham Young, Spencer W. Kimball, Harold B. Lee, Ezra Taft Benson, and others—making racial statements that range from unfortunate to deeply offensive. These quotes are real, they are accurately cited, and they represent a genuine stain on the Church’s institutional history. This response does not minimize them. However, the site makes a logical leap it never defends: that these leader statements are equivalent to scripture and therefore prove what the scriptural canon teaches.

The site addresses this distinction dismissively: “Apologists would argue these prophets were speaking as men… but that throws every past prophet under the bus.” This is not an argument; it is a rhetorical move. The Latter-day Saint theological framework explicitly distinguishes between canonical scripture (the Standard Works), official declarations, and the personal opinions of leaders. The Church has formally stated this distinction in its Gospel Topics essays. Elder Bruce R. McConkie—himself the source of some of the worst racial speculation in the 20th century—retracted his prior statements after Official Declaration 2, saying: “Forget everything I have said, and every other person has said, that is contrary to the present revelation.” This is not hypocrisy; it is the acknowledgment that speculative extrapolation beyond the scriptural text is not authoritative doctrine.

The Church’s 2013 Gospel Topics Essay “Race and the Priesthood”—an official institutional document—explicitly states: “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 actions in a premortal life.” Critically, these theories were never official doctrine—only speculative explanations offered by individual leaders, some of which were contradicted even by their contemporaries. The “neutrality in the War in Heaven” theory was explicitly rejected by Brigham Young himself in 1869, who stated that “there were no neutral spirits in heaven at the time of the rebellion.” The very leaders the site marshals as proof of coherent racial doctrine contradicted each other constantly.

The site’s argument requires the leaders’ racial statements to be authoritative when it suits the narrative and requires those same leaders to be discounted when it does not. The site uses Dallin Oaks’s 2018 “Be One” statement as evidence of institutional dishonesty, but Oaks’s statement is itself evidence of exactly the distinction the apologetic argument makes: the ban was a policy without a satisfying revealed rationale, which is precisely what one expects if the ban arose from cultural imposition rather than authentic scriptural teaching.

Claim 5: The Book of Moses and Book of Abraham Are Racially Motivated Fabrications

The site cites Moses 7:8, 7:22, and Abraham 1:24, 1:27 as proof that Joseph Smith was systematically encoding 19th-century racism into new scripture. This argument deserves a careful response.

The Book of Moses Passages

Moses 7:8—“a blackness came upon all the children of Canaan”—must be read in its full context. Moses 7 contains the vision of Enoch, one of the most remarkable universalist and anti-suffering texts in the restored canon. In Moses 7:18, Zion is described as a people with “one heart and one mind” where “there was no poor among them.” In Moses 7:28–29, God weeps over human suffering—a striking theological image of divine solidarity with the oppressed. The “blackness” passage in Moses 7 employs the same ancient idiom noted above and must be read alongside the chapter’s own comprehensive condemnation of human wickedness across all groups, not as a racial hierarchy. The biblical “curse of Canaan” tradition in Genesis 9 has been wildly misapplied for centuries by Christian and Protestant interpreters; the Book of Moses passages engage that tradition but do not independently invent it—nor do they endorse the racial-slavery applications made of it by later interpreters.

The Book of Abraham and Facsimile 3

The site’s argument about Facsimile 3—that Joseph Smith saw a black figure and “assumed it must be a slave”—is presented as self-evident proof of racial fabrication. It is not. The broader debate about Joseph Smith’s relationship to the papyri involves highly contested questions about what relationship the extant fragments bear to the final translated text. John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, and other Egyptologists with relevant credentials have published peer-reviewed work challenging the simple “Joseph made it up from the wrong papyri” narrative. This is not an assertion that the translation is unproblematic; it is an assertion that the site presents a complex scholarly dispute as a settled conclusion it is not.

More importantly: the claim that Abraham 1:27’s reference to Pharaoh’s lineage being unable to “have the right of Priesthood” is the basis for a universal racial restriction requires reading the passage through the lens of the later priesthood ban. The Abraham text itself describes a specific dynastic lineage at a specific historical moment. The interpolation of 19th–20th century racial theory onto that passage is precisely what critics accuse Joseph Smith of doing—but it is equally what readers do when they project 20th-century racial categories back into an ancient (or ancient-purporting) text about a specific Egyptian dynasty.

Claim 6: The 1978 Revelation Was Not a Real Revelation

The site quotes the LeGrand Richards interview with Wesley Walters to argue that Official Declaration 2 was an administrative decision driven by the opening of the Brazil temple rather than a genuine revelation. This argument has been widely circulated and deserves careful examination.

First, the Richards interview is not a complete account of the event. What Richards describes as “pretty true” regarding a pragmatic process is not the same as denying spiritual experience; it is an apostle giving an institutional account of the deliberative process, which has always included both prayerful seeking and practical catalysts. Gordon B. Hinckley’s account—that “for me, it felt as if a conduit opened between the heavenly throne and the kneeling, pleading prophet”—is not contradicted by Richards’s account. These describe different aspects of the same event.

Second, the argument proves too much. By the site’s logic, no revelation can be genuine if a practical catalyst existed. The D&C 76 vision came in response to a specific Bible passage under study. The Word of Wisdom (D&C 89) came partly because Emma Smith was troubled by tobacco use in the School of the Prophets. D&C revelations were routinely prompted by immediate practical questions. The presence of a practical catalyst does not negate the spiritual experience reported by multiple witnesses.

Third, the site uses the 1978 revelation simultaneously as proof of (a) institutional dishonesty because it was supposedly just a pragmatic decision, and (b) the fact that all the prior racist doctrine “came directly from the scriptures.” But if the scriptures directly and clearly taught the ban, why were the scriptures not changed to explicitly reverse it in 1978? The Church’s own answer—that the ban arose from cultural imposition and speculative extrapolation rather than clear scriptural mandate—is more consistent with Official Declaration 2’s silence on scriptural justification than the site’s narrative of deep scriptural racism.

Claim 7: The 1981 “White and Delightsome” Change Was Damage Control

The site treats the 1981 change from “white and delightsome” to “pure and delightsome” in 2 Nephi 30:6 as evidence of reactive PR management following the 1978 revelation. Critically, however, the site itself acknowledges that Joseph Smith made this same change—“pure and delightsome”—in the 1840 edition of the Book of Mormon. This is a significant concession. If Joseph Smith changed “white” to “pure” in 1840, that is strong evidence that the author himself understood the term as spiritual-covenantal rather than racial-biological. The 1981 change restoring the 1840 reading is therefore a correction to the canon’s best manuscript tradition, not a capitulation to social pressure.

Armand Mauss, a sociologist of religion who cannot be dismissed as a simple apologist, noted that Joseph Smith “replaced seeming skin-color references with terms clearly referring to spiritual quality” and never used the term “race” in discussing Lamanites or Nephites. This is strong historical evidence that the author of the Book of Mormon did not understand his own text as a racial taxonomy.

The site cannot have it both ways: it cannot argue that Joseph Smith embedded 19th-century racial ideology into the text and simultaneously acknowledge that Joseph Smith himself changed the text’s racially charged language toward spiritual language as early as 1840.

Claim 8: DNA Proves the Book of Mormon’s Race Narrative Is False

The site asserts that DNA evidence has “proven” that Native Americans are from Asia and not from Israel, and that this disproves the Book of Mormon’s racial claims. This argument, while relevant to questions of historicity, is not specific to the race question in the way the site presents it.

The Church already revised its Introduction to the Book of Mormon (2006) to state that Lehi’s family were “among the ancestors” rather than “the principal ancestors” of Native Americans, acknowledging a limited-geography or limited-population model. Under that model, the DNA argument loses much of its force: a small founding population of Near Eastern origin would not leave a detectable genetic signal in the broader Native American population after 2,600 years of admixture. This is not a post-hoc apologetic; it is straightforward population genetics. The site does not engage this response.

More relevantly: even if the DNA argument succeeds against claims that Native Americans are literal Lamanite descendants, it says nothing about whether the skin language in the text is racial-biological or covenantal-spiritual. These are separate questions the site conflates. The text can be historically false and still not encode racial-biological ideology—or it can use racial-biological language and still be entirely fictional. The site needs both arguments simultaneously and does not demonstrate that either is certain.

The Argument’s Self-Defeating Structure

The site’s argument has a fundamental internal contradiction it never resolves. It argues simultaneously:

The Site’s Contradictory Logic

Argument A: The Book of Mormon must be read literally; the “skin of blackness” is real biological pigmentation; any other reading is dishonest post-hoc rationalization.

Argument B: The Book of Mormon was written by Joseph Smith using 19th-century sources and idioms; it reflects 19th-century cultural assumptions about race.

These arguments cannot both be fully true at the same time. If the text is a 19th-century production reflecting 19th-century idioms, then the “skin of blackness” language should be read in its cultural context—where dark/black language was a conventional moral and spiritual idiom in popular religious writing as much as it was a racial marker. The apologetic reading requires the text to be understood in the idiom of its stated ancient cultural context (the ANE milieu Nephi’s family came from), which is precisely what the most careful scholarship does. The site wants the text to be modern for purposes of the DNA argument and ancient-literal for purposes of the race argument. It cannot be both consistently.

The site quotes LDS historian Richard Bushman acknowledging that the Book of Mormon contains 19th-century phrasing and theological idiom. But Bushman—a careful and honest historian who does not flinch from difficulty—has never concluded that the Book of Mormon is therefore a white supremacist text. The site uses Bushman’s candor selectively to reach a conclusion Bushman himself does not draw.

What the Evidence Actually Supports

A fair summary of the scholarly evidence yields the following conclusions:

Scholarly Conclusions

The passages are genuinely difficult — The skin language passages in 2 Nephi 5, Alma 3, and related texts present real interpretive challenges and have been harmfully misread throughout Church history. This is acknowledged honestly.

The literal racial-biological reading is not the only defensible reading — ANE parallels, internal narrative logic, and the self-marking passages (Alma 3:18) all point toward a covenantal-boundary-marker interpretation that does not require biological racial change.

The Book of Mormon’s dominant theological voice is universalist — 2 Nephi 26:33, Jacob 3:5’s rebuke of Nephite racism, the Lamanites’ consistent moral superiority at key narrative moments, and the destruction of the “white” Nephite civilization all militate against a white supremacist reading.

The priesthood ban was a cultural imposition without canonical foundation — The Church itself admits no written revelation establishing the ban exists. The speculative theories offered by individual leaders were never consistently taught, were contradicted by other leaders, and have been formally disavowed.

Joseph Smith’s own 1840 textual revision points away from a racial reading — The change from “white” to “pure” is strong evidence of authorial intent inconsistent with a racial-biological agenda.

The site’s argument is self-defeating — It cannot consistently hold both that the text must be read literally as racial-biological and that the text is a 19th-century production reflecting cultural idioms that were not uniformly intended as racial-biological.

None of this excuses the harm done by racist applications of Latter-day Saint scripture. It argues instead that the harm was done by cultural imposition onto texts that do not require or support a racial-biological reading, and that the Church’s 2013 disavowal of those applications is consistent with the weight of the textual and scholarly evidence, not contrary to it.

The honest intellectual position—the one the site claims to model but does not practice—is to hold the full complexity of these texts: the genuine difficulty, the internal counter-texts, the ANE context, the historical misapplication, and the Church’s formal disavowal. ldsdiscussions.com presents only the most damaging half of that picture and calls it honesty.