Jenny Pulsipher: “The Lamanites … are more righteous than you”: A Believing Historian’s Take on the “Curse” in the Book of Mormon

from A Thoughtful Faith for the 21st Century

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When I was a young mother living in the San Francisco Bay area, I was asked to teach a sharing time lesson for a stake primary activity. I don't remember the topic, but I vividly remember the inept way I tried to make the point that Jesus loves everyone equally. Looking out at the children, who included both light-skinned descendants of Europeans and darker-skinned descendants of Pacific Islanders, I asked, "Does Jesus love people with brown skin as much as he loves people with white skin?" Perhaps some of the children raised their hands to answer, I don't remember. But I will never forget the slumped shoulders and defeated look of a Pacific Islander boy near the front of the room who bowed his head and said, "No."

I had assumed the only possible answer to that question was "yes." Frantic to do damage control, I spluttered that Jesus did love brown people as much as white, he loved all people equally, skin color didn't matter. I don't know if any of my protestations were enough to reduce the shame I had inflicted on him by asking the question. My heart still breaks every time I remember that day.

That child's lived experience made it possible for him to believe that he was inferior to the white children he worshiped with. The striking difference between his home community—a place blighted by a violent drug trade—and the exclusive surroundings of the ward he attended sent the message that his community was lesser. Unfortunately, he probably got that message at church too, from well-meaning but stumbling people like me, and from primary lessons and songs that characterized all the Indigenous people of the Americas and Pacific Islands as "Lamanites" whose ancestors were wicked and cursed with dark skin. Focusing on and connecting skin color with wickedness is both hurtful to Latter-day Saints of color and, as I will argue below, mistaken.

Discomfort with how differences in skin color were interpreted in the Church has been a life-long concern for me, stemming from my own lived experience. My family participated in the Church's Indian Placement Program from the time I was seven years old. I was anxious for my Diné (Navajo) brothers to feel fully part of our family, ward, and community. I also identified strongly with my own Native American ancestors, Shoshones Sally Exervier Ward and her daughter Adelaide Exervier Brown, who were among the earliest Native converts to the Church. These connections sensitized me to problematic interpretations of skin color and made me feel discomfort on behalf of my brothers and my ancestors whenever I heard skin color or ethnic difference described as a sign of cursing or unrighteousness.

For the same reasons, I pay close attention to how skin color figures in the Book of Mormon. I love the Book of Mormon and have a spiritual witness that it is true. That witness dates from the first time I read it and prayed about it at the age of twelve, and it has been renewed through prayer and study during the dozens of times I have read it since then. While I approach the Book of Mormon as a sacred text, I also approach it through my training as a historian. This involves close reading, considering each writer's perspective and cultural context. My own context also matters. I, as a reader, am influenced by my own time and culture, which affect the assumptions I bring to my reading, what I see, and what I fail to see.

During my years of studying the Book of Mormon, I have come to believe that interpreting dark skin as a curse on wicked Lamanites is tragically mistaken. It confuses the prejudicial attitudes of some people in the Book of Mormon with God's will, and it ignores the revelations from God within the book itself that condemn such prejudice. Because of persistent assumptions and teachings that link dark skin with cursing and wickedness, many people within and outside the Church have felt shame, anger, or confusion surrounding the identity of "Lamanite.” To lessen that pain moving forward and take up President Russell M. Nelson's challenge to "lead out in abandoning attitudes and actions of prejudice," we need to learn to read the Book of Mormon differently, paying attention to the divergences between the attitudes of the Nephite writers and God's direction to them. The Book of Mormon reveals God's will for how people of different appearances and cultures should treat each other, but it also introduces us to a culture and people that, like our own culture, needed such teaching. Despite and because of the fallible people who appear in the pages of the Book of Mormon, it clearly speaks to the challenge of modern-day racism.

This essay represents how I have come to reconcile my conviction that the Book of Mormon is sacred scripture providing guidance on today's challenges with my recognition that interpretations of the book commonly used in the Church by lay members, policy makers, writers of manuals, and general leaders have fueled the fire of racial prejudice. I acknowledge the pain many have suffered because of discourses and practices surrounding skin color, even in the church that I love. I deeply regret times when I contribute to that pain. I hope that offering new ways to interpret the Book of Mormon will contribute to our shared effort to heal wounds and "root out racism."